The Times, 25 August 2016,
When most people arrive in a full car park, they see a parking problem.
When David Percy arrives in a full car park, he sees a geometry problem and, he says, most car parks have been offering the wrong answer.
Professor Percy, from Salford university, has shown that the conventional car park, with its series of rectangular boxes marked out by white paint, is an inefficient use of space. He found instead that with just minor tweaks you can improve capacity by more than 20 per cent without having to do anything other than use the same white paint to draw lines at an angle.
The inspiration for his research came from a sprucing up of his university car park. The standard rectangular lines were painted over and “this traditional conformity set me thinking”, he wrote in Mathematics Today.
What if the bays were at 45 degrees instead, angled towards the flow of traffic? While some car parks use this system, most do not. But does it have advantages? Might it ensure him more reliable access to departmental meetings?