Found this and thought it's neat to see the dimensions of cars properly. Mostly because there's a larger influx of American pickups in my town and I'm not enjoying it one bit.
Pickups are for farmers, how do you carry pigs or a pile of dirt in a van?
With less convenience and more difficulty.
I've done that kind of stuff, not great but it works. I can definitely see why people who don't very, very, very frequently need the enclosed cargo space prefer the pickups over vans.
How do you carry them in pickup?
I imagined all these people who are only a bit shorter but a bit wider than a van. :)
More generally it refers to doubling up two cars in a parking space in such a way that one car blocks the other in (eg parking two cars nose to tail in a long parking bay)
- Parking in the roadway next to the row of parallel parked cars/in other ways such that parked cars are blocked in
and
- Parking a single car such that two parking spots are obstructed (unjustifiably so, e.g. nobody would likely talk that way about an RV taking two parallel parking spots).
The difference in usage seems to depend on whether you (and your local cohort) spend more of your time parking in parking lots or on the street.
People who use it to refer to parking across two bays in a parking lot are using it wrong.
It’s like saying ‘well people in my region use the word “speeding” both to refer to going over the speed limit, and for going through a red light’.
People in your region have heard a term and misunderstood it.
Laws commonly include exceptions like;
> Vehicles used ordinarily for transportation of merchandise may double park for the purpose of, but only while engaged in, the expeditious loading or unloading
- that doesn’t mean delivery vehicles can park across two bays in a parking lot.
Language is how people use it. That sounds like a perfectly valid route to adding a colloquial meaning to a word.