An inconsiderate motorist’s Christmas Eve parking act has sparked outrage online — but others have insisted it’s not as bad as it looks.
A Melbourne Reddit user sparked heated debate after posting a photo of a car partially obstructing their driveway to the “r/wellthatsucks” forum.
“Someone parked across our driveway and we can’t get the car out on Christmas Eve,” user asomek wrote.
The photo showed the car’s rear wheels slightly forward from the lip of the narrow driveway, but the back of the vehicle extending out, blocking a portion of the access.
The post attracted nearly 1400 comments, with most suggesting the resident call a tow truck — or worse.
“There are many options, a lot of them are even legal,” one person said.
“Where I am, if your vehicle is blocking even a portion of my driveway, I can call the city and have them tow your vehicle, at your cost,” another said.
“Yeah. Tow that car immediately. It’s illegal everywhere to block driveways like that,” a third agreed.
But several users argued a car could fit through.
“That looks to be close to a car width’s size,” one said.
“Yep. You can make it,” a second wrote.
“As someone with a nearly identical driveway in Chicago and a full-size work pick-up, I don’t understand what they are complaining about. Might be like a seven-point turn, but if you can’t get out of this, then you suck at driving,” another added.
But the original poster insisted, “It’s not. Plus there’s a caravan parked directly across the road so I couldn’t turn anyway. It’s a narrow street.”
One user went above and beyond to analyse the situation.
“It’s a close call, for sure,” they wrote.
“Victoria license plate length: 14.6 in, average car width: 69.6 in
“We can infer from the image that each brick has a shorter length than the license plate.
“Based on the angle of observation, it’s visually ambiguous if there’s the equivalent of 7-8 brick lengths between the two vehicles. This would set a highly-unlikely maximum at 116.8 in.
“Assuming each brick is 75 per cent the license plate length (10.95 in) and there are eight brick lengths, we’re already down to a 87.6 in maximum, leaving an 18 in margin from the average.
“If there are only seven brick lengths of available space between the cars, that number drops to 76.65, and a 7.05 in margin from the average. That’s just over 3.5 in on either side.
“Either way, we’re talking about some precision driving under a best-case scenario, and a risk of damaging 1-3 vehicles an attempt to exit, assuming there is room to do so. Then you also have to consider that with the position camper, perpendicular to the exit, there might not be room to turn, or turn without the risk of damaging 1-3 vehicles.
“If you had the car specs for each of the visible vehicles, you could probably land on a nearly exact distance of space between the two vehicles on either side of the driveway, and then you’d just need the existing vehicle’s width to determine whether it was physically possible, from which the risks could then be considered.
“But yeah, tow it or do some lawn driving.”
One person replied, “Found the engineer.”
The whole story ended somewhat anticlimactically, however.
“Being Christmas Eve we didn’t think anything would be done if we called a tow truck,” the original poster wrote.
“They left eventually.”