Study Finds Parallel Parking is the Most Stressful Maneuver

Sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway can be extremely stressful.

Driving at the Jersey Shore in July can also be very stressful.

The list goes on and on.

Certain parts of driving can make you stressed out beyond belief.

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But, there's one maneuver considered the most stressful of them all.

Can you guess what it is?

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AutoTrader conducted the "Parking Heart Rate Study."

They attached heart rate monitors to the participants driving and monitored their heart rates while parallel parking, reversing into a parking spot, and pulling into a parking spot.

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"By analyzing the results, we discovered that parking phobias are a real thing; in fact, all the study participants' heart rate increased when performing each of the above maneuvers indicating that the drivers were experiencing some degree of stress."

What is the most stressful driving maneuver?

The driving exercise that caused the most stress on drivers was parallel parking!

Heart rates increased by over 57% on average.

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The study showed that women's heart rate spike was lower than male drivers, averaging 46 percent compared to 50 percent for men.

So when was the last time you parallel parked and did it stress you out?

Would you consider yourself a good parallel parker or driver who skips a spot because there's too much pressure parallel parking?

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LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

Gallery Credit: Sophia Crisafulli