Car Karma

I recently rented a car share to go downtown to buy some bins for my storage closet and screens for my windows. When I say I am not a car person, I mean it. This becomes painfully clear when I try to park around downtown in a car. I am much more comfortable in a bus than in a car.

My friends ask in awe about how I can maneuver such a large vehicle in traffic, but being bigger has it’s advantages. I have much clearer visibility up high with lots of big mirrors. In a car, I am more or less an equal, and I am continually shocked at how close people tailgate and fail to leave a space cushion around me. The lack of using turn signals is perhaps the biggest failure of motorists, and they seem oblivious to how the simple act of signaling your intention can prevent gridlock and reduce conflict and collision.

It can be seen that the reason a turn signal is not given is because the driver does not know where they are going! Seeing a back seat driver or a passenger with a map open is telling. Large car share stencils over the paint job of an auto alert regular city drivers that a novice is behind the wheel, and to give wide berth!

Wide berth, however, is inexcusable with your car’s ass sticking out more than 18 inches from the curb! The thought I am only going to take a second is no reason to park

more than a foot away from the curb, or to double park–especially on two-way streets. The red curb is red for a reason. We need the curb space to clear a turn.

On the bus I have what I call photon torpedoes. I can mark a spot on the ongoing video in front of my bus to capture a license plate of an offending vehicle blocking the transit lane or bus zone. I feel smugly complacent in generating revenue for the city at the flick of a switch, until I take away the notion of being separate from the people I was photographing. Being in a car share to pick up some office storage bins had me worried about my car karma. I had big stencils on my car and would be tagged as an idiot from the start. Would I end up being the same inconsiderate driver when loading bins into the hatchback?

I parked in the 5th and Mission garage and decided to carry the bins to the car in the garage. The store wouldn’t let me use a dolly to roll to the garage one block away. No problem, I thought, I can carry them. They were light but bulky. When I got to the garage, the top bin caught on an overhead exit sign and the whole load tumbled to the floor, cracking the lids on all of them! Perhaps this was payback for all the tickets I issued to folks going Christmas shopping one month earlier!

I have since not seen the bus with the ‘photon torpedo’ cameras, and I don’t take a picture of a vehicle’s plates if the car is not hindering any passenger to get to my front door. Only in the case of loading a wheelchair or someone on crutches, do I make a photo record of the offending vehicle blocking the curb. I allow any car intending to pull out from a parked position space to move into the traffic lane if traffic is creating a solid wall without a gap with which to move into the flow. If someone needs to get into their car, and I am in stopped traffic, I now always give them a car space to open their door and get in. Sure enough, I am let into the passing lane when blocked from a turning car. As I allow others to merge, so am I given Grace.

I can follow the Zen of not identifying anyone as stupid, and understand we are all trying to do the best we can with what we have been given.