Results of our parking poll

This year, Purple Parking has partnered with road safety charity Brake to help promote careful driving and safe behaviour on the roads. We know that our customers can often be tired when travelling for their holidays and may be driving at unsociable hours through all manner of weather conditions to reach our car parks. It's important to us that they stay safe and well when travelling, so this partnership seemed particularly fitting for us and our customers.

As part of this new partnership, we ran a survey for Road Safety Week to find out how good us Brits really are at parking.

We had a fantastic response rate, with over 2,800 people generating some very interesting results.

Here's a summary of the stats we uncovered from the survey...

Are we a nation of anti-social parkers?

51% of British drivers admit to some form of anti-social parking behaviour, including damaging vehicles, damaging public or private property, getting involved in an argument or leaving the scene of a parking incident without leaving details.

• Nearly a third (30%) have caused damage to their own or another person's vehicle when parking
• More than 1 in 5 (21%) of drivers have left the scene without leaving their details
• Two thirds (65%) of anti-social parkers are male
• A quarter (27%) of anti-social parkers are over 65 years old
• Interestingly, over half (52.5%) of anti-social parkers had parked someone else's car on their behalf
• 70% have parked, or seen another driver park, in a disabled or family parking space illegally
• 23% have either reported, or seen someone report another driver for illegal or irresponsible parking

Giving in to distractions?

• Many of those surveyed quoted causes such as high parking costs, small spaces or not enough spaces as the main cause of frustration with parking.
• Nearly two fifths of drivers (37%) considered personal distractions, such as lack of concentration, tiredness or nerves to have no negative impact on their parking abilities whatsoever, despite the fact that these are well recognised as contributory factors in a high number of road accidents.

Male parkers: Are you as good as you think you are?

• 53% of respondents considered men to be either good or excellent parkers, yet only 33% said the same about women
• Interestingly, even women scored themselves lower than men, showing that both men and women believe men to be better at parking their vehicles, despite the fact above that two thirds of those who admitted to anti-social behaviour were male
• Whilst women voted their skills as equal to men on aspects such as road safety awareness, consideration of other drivers, accuracy and the ability to deal with distractions, they considered themselves less capable when parking under pressure (being watched by others, parking on a busy road, parking in small spaces and parking quickly).

Put it down to experience?

• New drivers are considered to be the worst parkers, with 35.19% of respondents scoring them as 'poor' in their parking abilities
• However these were very closely followed by old people, with 35.08% scoring them as 'poor' in their parking abilities
• 1 in 5 also considered young people to be poor parkers

So those are the stats - do you agree with these findings? How do you rate your own parking skills - do you find manoeuvres maddening or do you rate yourself as a parking pro? Test yourself now by taking our fun Parking Pros quiz and see how you shape up!

Stats taken from a survey of 2,830 drivers, completed 13th November 2013.

In association with Brake.

Date published 01/12/2013

If there are any airlines or information not included here that you would like to know more about, email us at feedback@purpleparking.com and we'll include the most popular.