You park a manual-gearbox car facing uphill against a raised kerb on a street slope. Which way should the front wheels be turned, and why?

Why B is correct

Uphill with a kerb, the front wheels turn away from it — toward the traffic lane. The logic is failure-mode design: if the parking brake lets go, the car rolls backward, and wheels turned away from the kerb swing the rear toward the street while the front tyre drops against the kerb face and stops the vehicle at the road's edge instead of launching it backward into the lane. Downhill, the convention inverts — wheels toward the kerb — and with no kerb, wheels toward the edge either way. The wheel position is the second parking brake, and it costs three seconds.

Why the other options are wrong

A. Straight ahead, so the car rolls straight if it moves

Straight-ahead wheels give a failing brake a perfectly aligned runway backward into the lane. The whole point of turning the wheels is to convert a straight roll into a short one that stops itself.

C. Turned toward the kerb, so a rolling car is caught by the tyre resting against it

Toward the kerb is the downhill setting. Uphill with wheels cut toward the kerb, a backward roll drops the rear into traffic while the front tyre rests uselessly near the kerb it was supposed to catch on.

D. Any position, provided the handbrake is pulled hard

The handbrake is the first parking brake and the wheels are the second, and the rule exists for the day the first one fails. Gear selection in a manual — reverse or first when parked — is the third layer, and none of the three substitutes for the others.

On the road

A steep Victorian-era street, manual wagon parked nose-up. Handbrake on, reverse gear engaged, wheels spun away from the kerb until the front tyre touches the concrete. A delivery van parks the same way two houses down. Six months later you watch a taxi's handbrake let go on that same block — and the van's method and yours both hold, because the geometry did the braking the cables forgot.

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