Parking Lot Pinball

i would have put this in the Little Old Lady category except that it was my daughter who was frustrated by the situation recently. Have you noticed how very dangerous parking lots have become? I remember "the good old days" when people moved slowly through a parking lot. You never knew when a child might dart out from between two cars, or a car pull out of its spot. It was a place where you needed to be especially careful. All bets are off these days. People seem to assume that everyone is watching out for them and their children. Little ones are allowed to meander along by themselves. Teens, and older people to be honest, wander down the driving lane in a group talking or checking their phones, oblivious to the cars trying to get past them. Do they think they are alone out there? And the cars...is there anywhere that people drive slowly? It certainly doesn't happen in the parking lots I've been in, and they number in the hundreds, from tiny convenience stores to the largest malls. Cars zoom along like they're trying out for the Indy 500. One of the first big box malls that opened near me has the worst parking lot design I've ever come across. It is close to impossible to get in or out of it. The openings to the main road and the inner road that circle the parking area appear totally random. They don't match up anywhere. I'm pretty visual and can usually remember patterns, but I always end up driving around and around looking for the magic combination of openings that will get me where I want to go. It's been there for a good twenty years and I still struggle. One day I asked a friendly clerk in one of the stores if there was a purpose for the design of the parking lot of if it was just a diabolical joke. She said it was to slow down shoplifters so security could catch them before they got away. Hmm. That seemed like a stretch to me. I think the design was to slow down drivers, since this trend had been on the rise for many years. Of course, it has the opposite effect. Drivers get so frustrated at winding through the maze, that when they see a straight stretch of more than 8-10 feet, they floor it. That parking lot is one of the most dangerous places I know of. I'm truly surprised that I haven't witnessed multiple accidents as drivers appear to be playing bumper cars. And bumper people. I imagine that if we could hover over a parking lot it would look like a pinball machine. Sometimes I feel like the ball getting shot out of the way, and sometimes I feel like the flipper, about to make contact with something. Maybe someone could make a video game out of it.