How much of an issue is a tandem driveway?

[hollyblueivy]

We have always had the luxury of parking side by side. Looking at a property where one car has to park in front of the other.

how much of an issue / inconvenience is this?

would anyone consider this a deal breaker?

None at all. We are both insured on both cars so we just take whichever car is at the end of the drive. First come, first served.

This was a deal breaker for us when choosing a house.

We were living in a house with a terrible parking situation where parking was at the back of the house and a bit of a walk. So worse than tandem parking. But as a result of our daily experience of this we said we wouldn’t even look at another house where we couldn’t park side by side on a proper driveway.

In fairness when looking at houses we both were working long hours and had company cars so couldn’t just use each others car. It would have been another daily task to think about and do.

Also we found people who live in estates like this get fed up of car swapping eventually and end up having one car parked on the road. This means cars are littered all over the road, there’s no where for visitors to park, emergency vehicles and bin lorries struggle to get through and people start getting territorial about the piece of road in front of their house which can cause disputes.

Personally I wouldn’t touch it, but it depends on your situation and whether you can both drive both cars and what your daily schedules are like.

I think it’s disgraceful that planning authorities allow developers to plan estates like this, a 4 or 5 bed detached house should not have two tandem parking spaces at the very least they should have 2 accessible spaces. I have written numerous letters to our council about this but I get ignored.

We had this when I lived at home it had it’s challenges but ok if you use each others cars

not my proudest moment but my dad wanted me to move my car and I wouldn’t told him to move it himself he was fuming came down to find my car keys and a note he’d parked it 5 streets away lol

We have this set up, but we have two of the same car and don't do any swapping. We drive both interchangeably. They are electric though, so get charged overnight turn about. It doesn't cause us any issues.

It's annoying, especially when you're married to a shift worker! There's plenty of other parking near our house so my husband often parks elsewhere and leaves the drive for me.
We're moving in a couple of months and the new house has side by side drive. We would have compromised on the drive for the house and location though

Thanks all - having some doubts about this now, especially as this isn’t something we currently have to contend with.

We had it at last place and also at our current house.

Previous house had a drive for 2 tandem cars and we had one on the street (we had 3 cars). Current house is worse as we have a double garage, then 2 cars can fit on drive behind garage, so essentially a tandem 4 car situation as the 2 side by side in garage are blocked by the 2 tandem behind on driveway. Then we have 1 on the road (we have expanded to 5 cars).

In practice however, this makes the garage unworkable for cars, so it has become a dumping ground for various shit, and we have 2 tandem on the driveway and 3 on the road.

Whoever is first out just takes either the car last into the driveway, or one in the street, whichever they prefer. We have all keys hanging up inside the front door and people just take a key. Yes, most of us (not all) have our ‘own cars’ but flexibility is key. No way would we shuffle cars around to get out. The rare exception would be if we wanted a larger number of seats and that car was the first one on the drive, but that’s pretty rare to need these days (although I’ll always take it irrespective if I’m going on a long drive as it’s so comfy).