Take a drive onto any new housing development and one of the first things that you’ll notice is the parking. Or lack of it. New houses might have garages and what appears to be a spacious drive, but the chances are that once these are jammed full with boats, caravans, the second car and visitors, the occupants have no choice than to park out on the road with everyone else. Anyone arriving home late will have had the misery of trying to find somewhere to park, ending up possibly miles from home, probably parked outside someone else’s front door. When was the last time you actually saw someone parking their car in their garage? More importantly, when was the last time you parked in your garage?

Take a closer look at the cars and you’ll see that a large proportion will have minor damage to them – a broken wing mirror, scratches along the wing, a dented bumper. The majority of this damage will have occurred when the cars were parked and unattended, caused by other road users.

It’s not surprising sometimes, when you look at the way in which cars can be abandoned in a street with complete disregard. An old police officer friend of mine used to tell me that he always worked on the rule that a road had to be clear for ambulance, police, fire engine or lifeboat (it was a seaside beat), regardless of the road markings. Lack of yellow lines, contrary to a lot of opinions, does not mean ‘park where you like’. If the road didn’t have enough room, tickets were issued and on occasion tow trucks summoned.

In many areas now cars can no longer drive comfortably along residential roads without bumping or scraping something. It seems that Britain just doesn’t have enough room for all our cars, especially car parks, with an estimated 32 million car drivers chasing just 2.2 million parking spots.

Gary Numan once crooned ‘here in my car, I feel safest of all…’ but the same probably doesn’t hold in the 21st Century.

Analysis of over 100,000 accidents by the accident management specialists Accident Exchange between 2006 and 2008 revealed that one in five of all reported road incidents involved damage to a parked vehicle. With the cost of repair averaging £1,800, about 80 per cent of these Parked Car Incidents (PCI’s) occurred on the street and the remainder in public car parks, leaving UK drivers with a huge £1.25 billion repair bill to contend with.

“The problem is only set to get worse,” predicts Steve Evans, chief executive of Accident Exchange. He cites the expansion of residential permit areas, more cars per household, new inner city developments offering just one space per dwelling and modern cars being bigger and wider, as just some of the reasons behind the scale of the PCI problem.

Unsurprisingly, London topped the poll for PCIs, but incredibly Glasgow came second. Although there are only 197,000 registered cars in the city, Glaswegian drivers clocked up an annual repair bill of over £23 million, making it the second worst place to park in the UK. Either Glasgow drivers display a breathtakingly cavalier disregard for parked cars, or the Scots are more likely to claim on their car insurance for the cost of repair, which brings us to a very interesting and worrying point raised by Accident Exchange.

Like buying a house situated on a flood plain and then finding you can’t insure it, the concern is that in the very near future PCI hotspots could arise where the cost of insurance is prohibitive. Would you drive into an area or car park where you knew your vehicle was no longer insured, or where the premium is so high it’s just not worth parking there? Would you buy a property where your car will not be insured, even though its parked outside your house and crime is low?

Of course, an unscrupulous local authority could introduce a cut price homemade ‘congestion charge’, enforced by the insurance companies. Every night, when we are tucked up fast asleep, they drive down our streets, scraping our car doors, buckling our wing mirrors, bending our bumpers, damaging as many cars as possible. Suddenly they have their very own PCI hot spot – hey presto, no cars and clear roads.

Even if this particular example is far-fetched, the fact remains that none of us should be held hostage to the poor driving of our neighbourhood. There is a big difference between causing an accident and having an accident occur while you aren’t even in your car. In the long term the only solution is more parking places. But in the short time, how about slightly more careful driving, eh neighbours?

Explore Features

• Porsche

• BMW

• Mercedes

• Ferrari

• Bentley

• Audi

• Maserati

• Aston Martin

• Jaguar

• VW