One surprising (after we got a ticket..) thing about parking laws in Sweden is that you're also only allowed to park on the right side of the road / with the car in the direction of the traffic. This has the benefit of that when you're leaving the street parking, you are sitting close to the lane and can look behind you for coming cars and only cross one lane. Compared to parking on the "wrong" side, where you're sitting on the opposite side of the lane in your car, having your view of the opposing lane blocked by the parked car in front of you.
As a cyclist I wish we had the same rule where I live. Far too often a car parked on the street will not see me when they try to exit their spot, as it's only when half the front of the car is in the cycle lane they actually can see past the other car.
As a Swede it amazes me that some countries allow parking "in the wrong direction". I've never even thought about it, and I don't know if it's a written rule (I'm sure it is, just it;s been a long time since I got my license).
In finland this has been allowed since a few years ago. It is quite useful on narrow sidestreets in residential areas where it helps hunting for parking spaces.
The biggest problem seems to be that now many misinterpret the law that one must leave 5 meters empty space before pedestrian crossings as being measured from the front of the car, ie not applying when parking on the ”wrong” side
Also it seems less understood or followed rule is that it is also technically 5 meters from any crossing lane. And then sometimes whole intersection is very nebulous. As pedestrian crossing can be faraway from intersection and still be part of intersection...
You don't have to go further than Norway to be allowed to park on both sides of the street (unless indicated otherwise by signs) as well as park in both directions.
I believe many Norwegians have received parking tickets when visiting Sweden because if this difference. I wasn't aware of this myself until recently.
Where do you live?! You couldn't park facing the wrong way in any big city in America, either. Maybe on small residential streets it's not always enforced.
Norway. It might be more common than I anticipate, just weird that we've been parking in Sweden for decades not knowing this and never having received a ticket. I guess it has helped that it until a few years ago was quite hard to enforce tickets on foreign cars, so maybe they just skipped us and thus we never learned our lesson.
Seattle is noteworthy for being going against the norm in this case. As a midwesterner, it definitely surprised me to see so many "contra-parked" cars the first time I visited Seattle. It was one of those things that was just so deeply ingrained that it never occurred to me to park against traffic like that.
Ah yeah. I live in Portland and this is pretty uncommon here now, but I have seen it in Seattle more often on steep hills, which makes some sense. At least in the old days with a manual transmission, parking facing uphill was safer (wheels toward the street, too). The Seattle area is also weird in that it used to be the only place in America where 4-way intersections had no stop signs at all. No one knew if you should stop. No one party had the right of way. This went for most residential streets around there in the '90s... not sure how it is now.
As a cyclist I wish we had the same rule where I live. Far too often a car parked on the street will not see me when they try to exit their spot, as it's only when half the front of the car is in the cycle lane they actually can see past the other car.