Driving Me Crazy—gripes of a San Francisco driver

I enjoy driving, I’m a good driver. I became a good driver when I lived in Boston where the drivers are all daredevils; round-abouts/rotary intersections add to the challenge. The up side of Boston drivers is that they are alert. Sandwiched within my Boston driving was a year in Calcutta where I shared the road with lorries, bullock carts, push carts, bicycles, pedestrians, cows, goats, water buffalo, taxis, religious processions, and other cars. And as befits a former British colony, traffic moved on the left side, although any open space was fair game. Everybody’s envelope of self-protection was located at their skin, no additional protective distance existed, or seemed to be needed.

San Francisco drivers, on the other hand, are asleep. At a four-way stop, people behave as if they don’t know the rules of giving way to the car on the right or the car that arrived at the intersection first. Worse are the drivers who think there is a stop sign when there is none. In the neighborhoods, drivers breeze right through four-way stops as if there were no stop sign.

Drivers are not helped by the fact that traffic engineers seem to think stop signs should have trees in front of them so that one cannot see the sign. Thank goodness for the large STOP in the traffic lanes at the intersection.

Few drivers think of others on the road. They stop to pick someone up, drop someone off, or deliver a package without pulling over. They stop right in the travel lane so that the cars behind them have to try to go around, without being hit by the cars behind them also trying to get around the stopped car. This happens even when there is open space in the parking lane next to the curb. MANNERS, folks!

And the traffic engineers were remiss in the redesign of Castro Street between Market and 18th Streets, having only one lane of travel. They should have eliminated parking spaces so that delivery trucks would not have to stop in the single travel lane to unload cases of beer or deliver or pick up foodstuffs or packages. HELLO?! There is a line of cars here in this single travel lane that cannot move.

And while I’m on Castro, that new striping in rainbow colors at the 18th Street intersection has dark thin stripes going the wrong way so that when pedestrians cross, it does not interrupt the pattern, catch the driver’s eye as striping going the other way, the “normal” way, does.

I often drive across town before or at dawn. Too many pedestrians and bicyclists act as if there are no cars on the road, and they all seem to wear dark colors, the bicycles without lights or even reflectors. No wonder pedestrians and cyclists get hit and hurt and even die. WE CANNOT SEE YOU, FOLKS!!! You blend into the darkness and you do not look to see if a car is coming. Yes, pedestrians have the right of way, but if you’re dead or severely injured, that doesn’t count for much.

Cars should be designed with two additional and distinctive horn sounds, less startling than the main horn. One would mean “Go ahead,” the other, “I’m coming through.” I call this invention “Toot sweet” (tout de suite).

To borrow from Google, a message to people who use the roads: Don’t be evil. Or as they used to say in the olden days, “Mind your manners.” Xenia, Ohio used to have a sign that said “Merge with courtesy.” Actually, so many things in life would be much better if people internalized these cautionary phrases.