Maryland Driving road test

No one can say for sure whether this will lead to an uptick in dented car bumpers and curb-gouged tires. But Maryland has announced that demonstrating an ability to parallel park — an impossible skill to master for a lot of motorists — is no longer a requirement for getting a driver’s license in the state.

Everybody knows people who can’t parallel park. Maybe the space is 12 feet long, yet they couldn’t squeeze a Smart Car into it. They would just as soon try to land a jet.

The D.C. Department of Motor Vehicles driving test doesn’t include parallel parking. In Virginia, where the state DMV’s road-skills exam is administered to teenagers by private driving schools, there’s no demand to test parallel parking proficiency.

Now the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration officially doesn’t care, either. As of Wednesday, parallel parking was eliminated from the road test.

It’s simply a matter of “redundancy, ” MVA spokesman Buel Young said. The test includes a maneuver called a “reverse two-point turnabout, ” which involves the same skills at the wheel as parallel parking, Young said.

But a lot of driving instructors think there’s more to it than that.

“Not through any official channels, but I’ve heard that the fail rate for parallel parking was pretty high, ” said Tom Pecoraro, whose Maryland-based chain of I Drive Smart schools teach about 5, 000 new drivers a year, a vast majority of them teenagers.

“I didn’t hear that from the MVA, ” Pecoraro said. “But we talk with a lot of the examiners. That’s what everyone in the industry is saying: the fail rate was pretty high, and they want to be able to push people through.”

In other words, if fewer people fail, then fewer people will have to come back, and lines and waiting times at the MVA’s 17 full-service facilities could be reduced.

A youngster trying to get a driver’s license in Maryland first has to take a “knowledge” test at a computer terminal at any MVA full-service office. Then comes a road test, first on the facility’s closed course, then on public streets nearby.

The road test usually lasted 15 to 20 minutes overall, before the parallel parking exercise was eliminated, Young said. The time limit for parallel parking, which was done on the closed course, was three minutes. As for the “fail rate, ” Young said he didn’t know whether it was high or low. But that wasn’t the point of ending parallel parking, he said.

Although the reverse two-point turnabout (read: backing into a parking space) seems a simpler maneuver than parallel parking, skill-wise they are similar, he said.

“We’re constantly reassessing our testing, whether it be the knowledge test or the skills test, ” Young said. “In reassessing the skills test, we looked at it and we thought, ‘Okay, we’re testing some redundancy here, and we shouldn’t be.’ ”