Main Street in Barrhead still points every vehicle straight at the storefront. Nose in, tailgate out, both sides of the road.
The habit is older than the cars are. Teams and wagons were tied square to the curb long before anybody drove into town, and when the first automobiles showed up, drivers simply parked the way the horses had always stood. By the early 1900s, angle parking was being recommended outright as the sensible way to store a car on a busy street.
The Cities Changed Their Minds
Then traffic volumes climbed. Backing out of an angled stall into a moving lane turned into a genuine hazard, and through the 1950s cities across North America started pulling angle parking up in favour of parallel stalls and wider lanes. It was a reasonable call for a downtown carrying real traffic.
Small towns mostly declined the upgrade. They’re still arguing about it.
Four Towns, Four Answers
Westlock deleted a handful of angled stalls on 107 Street in 2021 and said the rest of downtown was staying exactly as it was. Athabasca cleared it out of its core entirely. Barrhead kept it on both sides of Main Street and hasn’t blinked. And when Slave Lake council once looked at going parallel, the merchants sat down and did the arithmetic, then pointed out the change would erase roughly a third of the parking on the block. The plan went away.
Those merchants were right about what they were defending, and it wasn’t nostalgia. A hardware store or a pharmacy runs on the customer who pulls up, grabs one thing, and leaves inside four minutes. Delete that stall and you haven’t improved the street. You’ve sent that person to the city to buy it there instead.
The Engineers Came Back Around
The part I enjoy is that traffic engineers have circled back to the angle, just reversed. Back in angle parking is spreading through some cities now, because a driver leaving the stall pulls out already facing traffic and can see what’s coming. Same footprint the wagons used. Better sightlines than either option that replaced it.
Seventy years of removing something, and the fix turns out to be the same geometry rotated 180 degrees. Meanwhile Barrhead never took it out in the first place.
Angle or parallel on your main street, which one are you defending?
