London: If you have ever felt your life is ticking away as you drive round and round in search of a parking space, you may be right.
British drivers spend nearly a year of their lives trying to park, a study has found. Whether it's due to lack of confidence, a shortage of parking bays or an inability to perform the manoeuvre, the average Briton devotes the equivalent of 25 minutes a day, or 152 hours a year, to searching for spaces.
Assuming someone holds a licence for 50 years, that adds up to almost 11 months doing nothing more than trying to park.
And it is not just time that is being frittered away, with the great space search costing the average motorist £120 (Dh693) in petrol a year. Much of the problem, it seems, is down to modesty and lack of confidence. Some 42 per cent of those polled by National Car Parks said they won't even attempt to park in a space if another car is waiting behind them.
Women are the more bashful of the sexes, with more than half admitting that they wouldn't park under pressure, compared to less than a third of men.
But almost quarter of the 9,000 motorists surveyed have so little confidence in their ability to squeeze into tight spaces that they will ask their passenger to park for them.
Less surprisingly, half of those polled said they regularly fall victim to ‘parking pontoon' where they are unsure whether to ‘stick' with the space they've found, or ‘twist' by continuing to look for something closer, only to end up losing the first space.
Unable to remember
The problems don't end with getting parked, with many of us unable to remember where we left our car.
Some 44 per cent of drivers owned up to ‘losing' their car on one occasion, with residents of Birmingham the most forgetful.
Those in London, Birmingham and Glasgow waste the most time trying to park, while parking is almost a pleasure in Edinburgh.
