Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large. 

It's too damn big

It’s pretty obvious that cars are getting bigger and bigger. What has not gotten larger in commensurate are the width of roads, and the size of home garages. The former is easy enough to fix: just tear up the current lane markings, and replace with ones wider apart. Obviously, certain streets are going to be impossible to do. For those situations, I think you simply have to ban cars of a certain size. Much like how some residential neighborhoods prohibit 18-wheeler trucks from entering.

Parking lots are similar to roads. The lot at my workplace have already gone through a widening of the berths. Previously, it had gotten so bad that you cannot open your own driver door if the car to your immediate left did not park exactly in the middle of two lines. You know who’s got the best parking lot? IKEA. The berths there are so wide - to accommodate furniture loading - that even the largest of SUVs has no issues fitting in comfortably.

Logic would say that if cars continues to get bigger, it’s only a matter of time before the parking structure at work will need to have its lines repainted again.

Cars becoming too wide to fit home garages is a far more difficult fix. Some of the older homes I see in San Francisco, ones built way back in the previous century, have garage openings that appears incapable of allowing a modern SUV to pass through. No wonder people would rather park on the street and use their garage space as storage! Widening a garage aperture is going to cost many thousands of dollars, and applying for a few permits. As we know, permits in San Francisco are super easy to get, so long as you know who to bribe.

One of the items to check off when buying a house should absolutely be: can your car fit in the garage with room to spare? Or maybe this is only a San Francisco problem. Everything is bigger in Texas, am I right?

Ice cold.

That could've been easily avoided

Last week my neighbor's brand new car had the misfortune of a hit-and-run. While it was parked on street in front of the house, another car bashed into its rear quarter-panel on the driver side, leaving a sizable dent on it and the lower bumper. It isn't pretty, and sadly yet another casualty of street parking in San Francisco.  

A major part of why I sold the ND Miata was the peace of mind from not having to deal with this kind of bullshit anymore. It ups my anxiety anytime I had to leave the car on the street due to fear of another driver bumping into it during parallel parking maneuvers. Or more commonly use my bumpers as feeler guides to know when to stop - we all know and have the battle scars. The Bumper Bully was invented because of cities like San Francisco. 

So part of me sympathizes with my neighbor, yet another part is full of disapproval. That's because my neighbor's house has a fully functioning garage, yet for whatever reason his family never park cars in it. Wouldn't it be smart to store the new car in there knowing full well the hazards of parking outside? Had his RAV-4 been in the garage my neighbor wouldn't be staring at an expensive claim on his insurance right now. 

Why don't people use their garages to park cars?   

I am not lucky to have a garage in our apartment complex, but if I were to have one you can bet it'd be used for its intended purpose. 

Remember, kids, don't take photographs on live train tracks, no matter how awesome it looked on instagram or tumblr. 

Remember, kids, don't take photographs on live train tracks, no matter how awesome it looked on instagram or tumblr.