Side entry or rear entry: the eight feet that decides it.

Of all the decisions in an accessible vehicle, this is the one most often made for the wrong reason — on a showroom floor, where there is unlimited space on every side and both options look equally good.

They are not equally good. They are good in different places, and the place that matters is wherever you park most.

The eight feet

A side-entry ramp deploys out of the sliding door, and then a chair has to turn onto it and travel up. Between the ramp's own footprint and the turning room at the bottom, you need something in the neighborhood of eight feet of clear, reasonably level space alongside the vehicle.

A striped accessible parking space gives you exactly that — the hatched access aisle beside it exists for this purpose. That is why side entry feels effortless in every parking lot demonstration you will ever be given.

Now go measure your garage. Then the spot where you park at work. Then think about the last time you parked at a trailhead, a church lot, a relative's driveway with a car already in it, or a downtown street.

What rear entry trades

Rear entry deploys into the space behind the vehicle. In a standard parking space that space is the drive aisle, which is almost always available — you back in, or you don't, and either way there's room.

The trade is layout. The wheelchair position sits toward the rear of the vehicle, typically in the center channel where the floor was lowered. For some families that's a non-issue. For others — particularly a parent who wants a child within reach, or a couple who want to sit beside each other — it's a real loss, and worth paying for side entry to avoid.

The other trade is subtler: with rear entry you are loading from the drive aisle, with traffic behind you. In a quiet lot that's nothing. In a busy one at night it is worth a thought.

How to actually decide

Spend one afternoon with a tape measure and a notebook. Measure the clear space beside where you park:

• At home, in the garage or driveway, with the other vehicles where they normally sit
• At work, or school, or wherever the daily trip ends
• At the two or three places you go most often — the grocery store, the clinic, the church

If you consistently have eight feet or more, side entry is open to you and you can choose on layout. If you consistently don't, rear entry isn't a compromise — it's the correct answer, and a side-entry vehicle would have been a daily frustration.

Lifts change the question

Everything above assumes a ramp. A platform lift has a smaller deployment footprint than a ramp — it goes down rather than out — so the clearance problem eases considerably, though it does not vanish. On a full-size van or Sprinter, where a lift is generally the answer anyway, side versus rear becomes much more a question of interior layout than of parking.

If you're still working out whether you're a ramp household or a lift household, start there instead: ramp or lift, how to tell which one you need.