It’s not the number of cars on our roads that creates a problem, so much as the headache of where we leave the things. Simon Hacker searches for a safe place to park your sanity.

1 A new website that catalogues the rude messages drivers post on each other’s badly parked cars marks just another step in Britain (and the world’s) slow descent into all-out parking war. Daniel Mehmet got the idea when walking around his neighbourhood in Bristol. Being so shocked by the level of passive-aggressive abuse, he decided to turn the trend into online entertainment (www.sparkol.com).

2 Clearly the temperature is rising as we try to negotiate the challenge of rising car ownership and increased pressure on urban space (indeed, parking rage is now the literal trigger for many murders worldwide). But what’s the real measure of this daily problem? One metre eighty centimetres is one answer – at least on the micro level. It’s the minimum width of a parking space, according to Department of Transport regulations, when allocating on-street parking. Maybe that’s not so bad, until you factor in the average growth of a typical UK car in the last two decades (16 per cent), which leaves you with the snug statistic of the pretty svelte BMW 3 Series being 1.8m wide, even before you’ve unfolded its flipping wing mirrors.

3 So we’re literally outgrowing available space, but there’s another obvious reason for our claustrophobia: the RAC Foundation says the number of cars we own peaked at a heady 30.2 million in the UK in September 2015, which is a 1.2 per cent rise in 12 months, while the relative affordability of used cars, boosted by low fuel prices, can only bode a rise in the trend.

4 One consequence of Britain’s ever-shrinking space is the phenomenon of what we might term distress parking. A poll by Axa Car Insurance has revealed that the number of £70 parking tickets slapped on parents’ windscreens as they stop on the zig-zag safety lines outside schools has soared from 14,564 in 2011 to 28,169 in 2013. Bad parking is anti-social, yet perversely perhaps not: Professor Nick Hounsell, head of the Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton, says we’re often just the victims of initiatives used by local authorities to try and reduce the number of parking spaces available. In their drive to promote the use of more sustainable modes of transport, authorities’ parking charges have risen to the point where they appear punitive, he says, because that’s what they effectively are.

5 Might a more sensible system be achievable? After all, a famous IBM survey of what happens when we get behind the wheel found that we average 20 minutes in every commute looking for a parking space, wasting fuel and spewing pointless emissions in the process. Furthermore, our addiction to personal wheels spells the necessity for several parking spaces for each driver – one at home, one at work, one for shopping, leisure… In fact, a 2011 study at the University of California-Berkeley found the nation has somewhere close to a billion parking spots, but that with 253 million passenger cars and light trucks out there, that spells roughly four times more parking spaces than vehicles. If you add up all the area devoted to parking, it is roughly 6,500 square miles – an area bigger than Connecticut.

6 However you measure the impact of our appetite for parking space, it is hard to resist the argument that shared transportation, where practical, would be a major tool for unravelling the issue. A private, single-user car seems a lavish concept in the light of the way it is actually used, or not used: the RAC Foundation found that the average UK motor spends 80 per cent of its life parked at home, 16 per cent parked somewhere else (be that work, leisure, or shopping) and just four per cent being driven. So we tend to buy a car which we need to get us from A-to-B during that small space of time that has nothing to do with that 96 per cent of the rest of our lives. It’s certainly something to think about, the next time you’re driving around looking for somewhere for your car to call home.