Or maybe you’re learning to drive and preparing for your driving test and in need of some last-minute advice on manoeuvres? Either way, here’s our ultimate guide to forward and reverse bay parking.
Bay parking is the art of manoeuvring your car into a parking space.
It might sound like a simple, everyday part of driving but for some motorists the prospect can be daunting at first.
There are two types of bay parking:
There are two main types of parking bays that you’ll come across when parking your car: perpendicular parking bays and the less-common angled parking bays (also called echelon parking bays) which are helpfully placed at angles to the road.
The recommended size of a parking bay in the UK is 2.4 metres wide and 4.8 metres long, with a recommended space of 6 metres for manoeuvring (roadways). These are not legal minimums though, which is why some spaces might seem tighter than others.
Some of our favourite cars are getting wider nowadays so parking spaces have never seemed so small! Even compact cars are spreading out — The Nissan Micra has grown in width from 1.61 metres to 1.98 metres over the last 20 years.
If you ever want to use any of the UK’s thousands of car parks that use bay parking spaces, you’ll need to learn how to not only safely enter a parking bay, but also how to exit one too.
Since December 2017, front and reverse bay parking has also been included as one of the three possible manoeuvres in the practical driving test for learner drivers, along with parallel parking, reversing and re-entering traffic. Examiners could ask participants to undertake a reverse or forward bay park, so it should be something you practice a lot of before taking your practical.
