As seen on Contemporist.com, these Parallel Park patio-meets-parking spaces are functionally creative, while adding vibrancy and street calming to commercial districts. Of course these would need to be placed in the ideal spots around town, but I could see a couple of the non-traditional bump outs fitting into the fabric of say Chippewa?
You can see that the road striping keeps cars far enough away so that poor parallel parkers don’t accidentally knock into the pop-up-parks (as seen here in Vancouver).
If you are questioning the safety factor on this type of installation, then you need to examine accident reports that show how many parked cars gets sideswiped on streets with slower traffic patterns. Allentown, for example, might also be a good fit for this sort of feature. Just think of a coffee shop that has no room to put a patio out on the sidewalk, then picture a Parallel Park situated out in front in the street…
To see more images of the Parallel Park, click here. Thanks to the BRO reader who submitted this idea.