Actually on the small downtown streets of my home city they allow parking too close to the intersection such that the view of my civic doesn't allow me to see particularly far down a relatively busy one way street. To compensate for this I roll down the window to listen for tire noise. Maybe not strictly necessary but I'm not sure its quite true to say that people drive by vision 100 percent of the time. Of course they could just add a fisheye mirror on each intersections street or roll back the parking but still. Another example that comes to mind is those old one lane tunnels where you have to stop at the edge and listen for a honk for a few seconds, honk and then go.