Searching for a parking space

Studies of car driving have tended to be based in cognitive psychology of a mentalistic streak where navigational and search activities are assumed to be based on internal and individual mental choices and decisions based on the perception of an external environment. This article remains concerned with navigational and search procedures though by contrast it treats these as publicly available courses of action intelligible in the details of driving, traffic, mundane street architectures, the sequential logic of searching for a parking space and more. Driving is taken to be a collective achievement of those particular members of traffic cohorts wherever we find them. Ethnographic video materials are drawn upon to provide a rich source of the real-worldly work of a singular instance of finding a place to park in a busy city centre.