Worst. Parking Lot. EVER.

How many engineers does it take to design a parking lot? No, seriously-- how many? Whatever the number, the end result leads me to believe that whoever designs and/or constructs these lots must be short an engineer more often than not. I'm sure everyone can think of at least one lot where the lines were drawn so close together that, even though they can get the car into an empty space, they can't open the door if there's a vehicle in either one of the adjacent spaces. Or those big, complex lots with lots of blind spots and no signs helping to direct traffic. It's a parking free-for-all; enter at your own risk!

Honestly, people-- how hard can it be? I'm no engineer, but I think I could tell from the get-go whether or not a parking setup is going to work. And yet, I continually find myself trying to navigate through a lot with a severely bottle-necked entrance/exit or with a one-way arrow painted on the asphalt pointing drivers in the wrong direction.

For me, though, the lot that takes the cake would have to be the one outside a popular grocery store on Lincoln Avenue. Those who live in the city know that Lincoln is one of those rare diagonal streets amidst the grid of north-south and east-west thoroughfares. The store is part of a miniature strip mall, and design mistake #1 was that the building's foundation was poured to align with the aforementioned grid, and not the diagonal street out front.

So the parking lot engineers came in and turned the lot along Lincoln Avenue into an isosceles triangle. This placed the smallest angle of the triangle directly in front of the entrance to this immensely popular grocery store. This is a prime example of a parking lot fail. The pathway to the spots on either side of this parking nook gets narrower and narrower until it finally ends in a point. When it's busy, people are forever gunning their vehicles in reverse (into oncoming traffic, mind you) because somebody's gotten stuck in the parking equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. Yet, incredibly, people still try to park there; it makes for some great people watching, and would be an amazing observational experiment for some psychologist's research.

Then, to make matters even worse, they stuck a huge island in the larger part of the lot. Perhaps this was meant to maximize parking, but really it just leads to countless traffic tie-ups. The only normal spaces in this lot are at the far corner; even so, I tend to park on the street just to avoid all the chaos! I've long said that, if this whole music thing doesn't pan out, I should go into business designing parking lots. Well, I guess my common sense is needed in this field more urgently than I previously realized!

Do you have a parking lot that you avoid because of some blatant design flaw? Where is it? I think motorists everywhere should band together and call them out; now's the time!