Perhaps I'm generalising, but my own gut feeling seems to agree with many of the posters above. Many houses have been built with garages too small to fit most modern cars. Mother-in-law's was an odd exception; the garage could just squeeze in a smallish modern car, but the driveway alongside the house was narrower than the garage at the rear! Our house - originally built in the late 1960s - had a garage which would just about take our (old style) Kangoo (it was not used for storage at that time), but only if you reversed in, as the door would not close over the high back, and only if you parked off-centre to allow the driver's door to open (alternatively you could have climbed into the rear seat and used a sliding door I suppose). I think it's only in the last ten years or so that this problem is beginning to go away - perhaps council planning departments are getting wise.
When we rebuilt our house (to add a couple of bedrooms) one of the conditions of planning consent was that we provided room to park three cars off road. Although the garage would have counted, in reality we would never use it for parking, and it was only just possible to park two smallish cars in front of the closed garage door, so we demolished the garage, extending the parking space slightly behind where the rear of the garage used to be and now have enough space for three cars, one of which is a 7-seat Berlingo.
Totally agree on not using the pavement for parking. It's not only inconvenient for pushchairs, people with limited vision and wheelchair users but can actually be dangerous if people have to - or choose to because of a bottleneck - walk in the road to get past. Of course, many new developments would also have been granted planning permission conditional on being able to park two or three cars off road and have short driveways and small garages meaning that in most practical circumstances there's only room for one, and if it's not used for storage it seems to be very common to convert a garage - particularly one which is built in to the house - into a study or a playroom or (depending on layout) a kitchen extension. Occasionally you do see these partitioned up with the garage door being retained for a half-length (or shorter) garage which is used to store bikes and / or gardening tools.
On the other hand, I know someone who has just bought a house on a new development which not only has a garage big enough for two normal cars side-by-side (but it's also used as storage so realistically only one) but because they are on an end-plot in a cul-de-sac they have enough space on the drive to stack four, maybe five cars, or to use part of the drive to avoid having to reverse on to the road. It can be done!
