> although I find driving in SF much more stressful and confusing than London(despite being a native RHT driver), I never managed to get a ticket in SF.
In the US you get fines for that too. (I learned this after I moved from places without curbs, where everyone parks on the verge rather than the street, to a town with curbs and therefore on-street parking.)
> staying in a parking spot for 10 minutes too long
Also in the US.
> I'm looking forward to living in San Francisco
Do you think the parking will be easier and driving will incur fewer fines?
>>:-) You haven't driven around SF much perhaps? But notice he said "almost" not "did" so clearly he is leaving enough space to avoid collisions.
Have driven plenty in big cities and small towns. You should always leave enough space in front of you in case somebody suddenly stops.How much space you leave in front of you depends on how fast you are going. At least that was drilled to me by more experienced drivers. I think it was even part of the DMV exam. I have not driven in San Francisco. How bad is it? Do they drive bumper to bumper?
> What is the meaning of 0 to 60 in 4 seconds when there's traffic anyway?
I take public transit and don't own a car ($500/m parking, insane insurance rates in SF, cars broken into within minutes in daylight), but drive rentals/carshare-by-hour periodically. Merging and accelerating onto a freeway from a rate limited entryway stopped to 60 is somewhat useful while keeping up with flow.
> 2) The driver missed the exit for SFO, and drove through the median to get to it
I have never made that SFO exit & had to drive through the median every single time. Been to SFO about a half dozen times this past year. The signs to that SFO exit aren't really in sync with the actual exit...you sort of have to know where the SFO exit is & ignore the sign. Even when I mentally make a note to do that, sometimes the sign confuses me & I end up missing the exit.
I'm a 30-something middle-class white male who works in tech in a large Canadian city with excellent public transit. I don't have a driver's license, and I'm constantly running into idiotic barriers because I don't have one. People and processes seem to assume that I do and when confronted with the contrary, a lot of people don't really know what to do.
> This means I’m required to drive into the urban center for work where parking is already expensive and difficult to find.
Do you mean you literally drive into a city centre at rush hour, park there, and go into an office?
It blows my mind that people are even able to do that. It actually says something perversely positive about US roads and cities that it's possible!
I would not attempt to drive into the centre of a city in the UK for any reason at any time of day ever. You would not make it to your office before the day ended and when you got there you'd simply find there was no parking anyway and you'd have to go home again!
> I think you would find that the vast majority of drivers in the US don't parallel park even once per year.
In the UK, I had the exact opposite experience. Immediately after passing my test, I was parallel parking daily, and I've frequently been in situations where parallel parking is the only way to find a parking space. IMO it _would_ have been dangerous had I not learnt how to do it and was confident doing it. I'd have likely have been too distracted thinking about what I'm trying to do rather than paying sufficient attention to my surroundings. I know I was when I was first learning, and I failed my first driving test because I didn't adequately check my surroundings before starting to reverse.
> ...San Francisco and also drives a LOT (10-20k miles per year...
I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving.
It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.
Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.
So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.
But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.
Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.
As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.
And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.
> I never really knew how to drive safely before I had to drive knowing that any mistake I made might send me to jail.
Huh? You drove after you knew you had a suspended license? You had to drive?
If I understand what it means to not have a license, the thing to do in that situation is to have someone else drive your car to a long-term parking spot if it isn't in one already, and just leave it there until you have it reinstated.
> So basically just like everywhere else in the world.
> You ever been to a Walmart parking lot? Or a DMV?
Have you? Because we visited very different places, if so. Nobody in the US dares to roll past a stop sign, let alone double-park. Merely the fact that you've said this makes me doubt you've ever even been to the US.
> What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up?
That would be an extremely stupid thing to do in San Francisco. I would not trust drivers here at all to pick it up. I would just wait until all the cars were gone.
> I was taught in drivers education (California) to always set my parking brake
Are you saying there are people who don’t do that? As in people just put the car in park gear mode and not use the parking brake?
BTW, I have been noticing very few people turn the wheels towards the curb/or away depending on the case, in hilly/not-flat areas, which seems crazy to me as well.
Not reasonable. You'd be parking the car at least half a mile from where I live because it's full of these streets. Usually they're one car at a time because cars are parked on both sides of the street causing the streets to become just big enough for one car to get through.
For reference, I live in San Carlos (Bay Area). I've encountered this same issue in many other parts of the USA too. It's not uncommon at all.
Did you ever park outside a parking garage?
reply