houseguests...can't figure this one out!

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Cybrvanr

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Jan 23, 2005
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My house, has a dirt access road on one side that allows me and my neighbors to get into our back yards. I built a concrete driveway in the back yard for working on my vehicles near the back edge of the yard. When I know people are coming over, I will typically put all my vehicles in the driveway out back. This is to be nice and to leave plenty of space out front for visitors to park on the paved road, come up the sidewalk, and use the front door so that they won't get their cars dirty, or need to walk though the muddy yard to get to the house.

The typical thing that happens is that instead of parking out front, people will pull down the dirt road, and park in the driveway out back. Because there is not enough space in the driveway...because I put all my own cars in it...their car hangs out in the middle of the dirt road. The visitor will then walk through the muddy back yard to the front door. After answering the door, they will mention that there's no room in the driveway...ARRGH!

A similar thing happens at my parents house. They have a steeply sloped driveway that goes down to a basement garage. It's at a sharp angle, and many vehicles will scrape trying to get in. For that reason my parents park their own vehicles in the driveway, because he knows how to get in it without scraping, and he doesn't want other people to damage their vehicles on the driveway. There is always one person though that attempts to park in the driveway, despite the fact that there is no room there...but plenty of space on the street in front his house!
 
Yea, I think I'll just hafta tell people that there's parking out front when they ring. I do prefer to use the back door myself for that same "informal" reason, if it's more accessable... but then again it makes me wonder why someone would park out back, and then walk around the house to the front to enter. Most of my friends and family members that are regulars to my home have figured it out. I had a co-worker stop by yesterday evening to borrow some tools, and he mentioned that parking was troublesome and he had to walk in the mud.

I guess the driveway theory of averages is similar to the trashcan theory of averages:

I worked at an amusement park one season as a teenager. One of my jobs was emptying the trashcans. It was always rather curious that people will put trash in an already, or near-full trashcan, instead of using an empty one beside it. More often than not, I would come up to a group of trashcans, and one or two of the trashcans would be overflowing with trash, while the others would be practically empty. One would think that the trash would be equally distributed among all the cans if they were all emptied at the same time (we put in fresh bags every morning no matter how full they were).
 
Sorry, I know this is off topic...............

Since I work in the trash business, you are so right!!!
People will continue to fill a can that is overflowing rather than use an empty one that is next to it!

Here in New york, people are less than 5 feet away from a garbage can and still throw the garbage on the sidewalk or in the streets and the number one pet-peeve that I have against people who litter is the one who drives their cars through the neighborhood that don't live in the community and dump their garbage out the car windows! What NASTY PIGS we have in gotham!
 
What y'all are talking about is herd-behavior. "Everyone else did X, so I shall do X also, even if Y is the more reasonable choice."

Very often this occurs because people really don't know what to do, or what the design intention was for something e.g. a driveway or a set of trash bins.

Sometimes this can be fixed by simply explaining the logic of your intentions, i.e. park here and walk there, avoid mud; or if bin A is full, put trash in bin B.
 

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