SOUND THE SIRENS

Sandy Myhre conducts a reality check on the 'new belief' that women require special parking bays to meet their spatial intelligence challenges.

A few months back the Mayor of the German town of Triberg introduced women-only parking spaces because, he said, women were worse at parking than men. The wider spaces are better lit, marked with a female symbol and not next to any concrete pillars. Mayor Gallus (rhymes with phallus) Strobel then revealed the real reason behind this considerate gesture. "While they're at it," he told Der Spiegel magazine "they can see the town's attractions."

So the hapless chap suffered world-wide criticism when all he wanted to do was promote tourism! And yet he wasn't the first to suggest parking-for-dummies. A shopping centre in the Chinese city of Shijiazhuang built a car park with spaces nearly a meter wider than normal and just for women drivers.

The shopping centre women-only car parks were painted in a delicate pink and light purple and according to the manager, Mr Wang (rhymes with bang) Zheng, these pretty lines would appeal to women's "strong sense of colour and different sense of distance." Furthermore, female parking attendants have been employed to guide female drivers into their berths.

Given the raison d'etre applied to gender-specific wider parking spaces, surely having women guiding women drivers is the blind leading the blind? And women aren't the only problem drivers in China when you consider there are more than 200 road accident deaths there every day.

It took scientists from a German university conducting research into the 'spatial intelligence' of women to conclude that spatial performance (part of which is getting a ginormous car into a ridiculously small space) is sensitive to hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle. It means we're dangerous at a certain time of the month but it surely didn't need a collegial geek on a grant to point that out. Fortunately we're more sensitive in New Zealand.

Auckland Transport communications manager Wally (rhymes with golly) Thomas, commenting on the Triberg-style bays said there was "no way" parking spaces like this would be introduced here. But what about the Far North? Mayor Wayne (Surfing Lane) Brown adopts a lateral view and succeeds - probably deliberately - to avoid answering the question altogether.

"I catch a bus quite often in Auckland and I'm a dinosaur who still stands up for women but up here in the Far North you have trouble finding enough people to park!"

He also suggests most of the population has the ability to walk but, come to think of it, pedestrians need somewhere to park too. Maybe town seats could be painted pink and purple so women with spatial difficulties and a fondness for colour could plonk themselves down without scraping pillars. It could open up tourism potential. Following the Triberg Mayor's widely-reported comments tourists flocked to the town to try out the parking spaces.

What the world's press failed to realize is that in the Far North we got there first. We have colourful, easily negotiated parking spaces designated male-only and female-only that are a tourist attraction. They're called the Hundertwasser toilets and no-one's kicked up a stink (rhymes with sink) about those.