I posted about this a while ago, and someone said that dogleg shift patterns aren’t great in the city because you’re frequently moving from 1-2.
Well, I live in the city and that is a straight up lie. Yes, there’s constant stop and go traffic, but I’ve still found that a majority of my shifts are 2-3, not 1-2. Also, most of my stop and go traffic comes to an almost stop, but when it comes time to get moving again, I’m still rolling a little, and cannot get into 1 as my car locks me out of 1 if I’m not moving because there’s no synchro. I just ride the clutch in 2 until I’m up to speed, which... whatever.
Yesterday, I was parallel parking. Since I have a VW, my shift pattern looks like this:
Moving from 1-R and R-1 is a royal pain in the ass with this pattern. A dogleg pattern would be a vast improvement.
When I was learning to drive stick in my Golf, I also noticed that every single person who drove my car had trouble getting the shifter into the spot for R with it all the way over by your knee. This is a purely ergonomic problem specific to my car- with throws that are roughly two feet, the shift knob is physically touching my knee when I’m in reverse or touching my passenger’s knee with it’s in fifth. If there were a dogleg pattern, the side to side range of movement of the shifter would be about three or four inches less, eliminating this annoyance.