Room for one more?
WITH all these new rockets and massive telescopes they keep blasting up into the stars, I thought space was getting bigger, the universe was expanding.
After all, we’re always hearing about the new parts of the universe they’ve discovered and what this could mean for life on earth.
Of course, everyone knows that us Ants are the most adaptable creatures around, so we don’t really fear anything coming out of deep space.
But, a little closer to home, it seems there’s not as much space about as there used to be. Actually, to put it another way, our cars are getting bigger and so it’s even harder now to squeeze into a parking space.
It seems some boffins (yes, they’ve been at it again) have worked out that the average British car is getting too big for the average British parking space. On average, the average width of a car in Britain is now two inches wider than the minimum width of a parking space.
Creature Comforts
Of course we all like our creature comforts (some, more than others, GrAnt) and this has led to folks demanding bigger and wider cars. The big-selling motors have widened by 16 per cent over the last 40 years – that’s worse than me after Christmas!
It’s not all comfort however. Cars today have many more safety features and there are tighter restrictions on child car seats.
Families, we are told, are getting smaller but it seems the cars they drive aren’t. Take the old reliable Ford Escort. It first hit our road roads in 1968 at a positively anorexic 5ft 2in in width.
Now, over 40 years later, the Ford Focus, the latter-day equivalent, bursts the tape at 6ft 1in – that’s almost a foot more.
The Department of Transport’s guidelines say that 5ft 11in is the minimum width an on-street parking bay should be – you don’t have to be a maths whizz like Ant Tony to work out that it’s going to be a tight squeeze for many motors while others simply won’t fit.
And when cars are packed too tightly together, there’s going to be the inevitable dinks and scratches (and how likely is it that one of your fellow motorists is going to own up to scraping your car door?).
That’s when you’ll be glad you got old Brilly Ant on the case for cheap car insurance.
In the meantime, why not try a motorbike?
