I don’t know what it is with drivers on certain streets in downtown SB. It seems like people drive worse on certain streets than on others. Perhaps all the one-way streets make people nervous or insane, but that’s no reason to do equally insane things to annoy or endanger other people.

When I leave my house in the morning, I must make a left turn from a one-way street onto a 2-way street. The one-way street has the right of way as the 2-way street has stop signs on both sides. Whenever there is a car stopped at the stop sign to the left of my car where I am making my turn, 99 times out of 100 (sure I could just say 1 out of 10, but my point is that this happens A LOT) the person is over the painted line on the street. I’m not even talking a little over the line…I’m talking like everything but the rear bumper is over the line. This is annoying and a little dangerous. For one thing, the car is now almost sticking out into the one-way street, so the driver going straight would have to swerve out of the way a little. But the reason that it bothers me most is because when you turn onto that street, there are lots of cars parked on the right-hand side. The driver being pulled so far out means that you have to maneuver a lot more carefully to avoid hitting them or the parked cars. ARG!

Another thing that bothered me about this street happened just the other day. The street has cars parked on both sides so you have to be a little more conscious of where your car is when another vehicle approaches from the opposite direction. You don’t want to hit the parked cars, but you don’t want to hit the oncoming vehicle either.

Well, a guy totally swerved into the middle of this somewhat narrow road the other day because he decided to turn his head to look at the girl that was walking on the sidewalk. She wasn’t even all that! She certainly wasn’t worth dying or wrecking your car over! Dude, pay attention to the road.

Gotta love downtown driving. I suppose it could be worse though…I could be driving in IV. Now THAT’S a whole other story!

Posted at 9:50 AM |

LOL as opposed to what? Granted it’s nowhere near comparable to, say, downtown LA driving, but it is still a different experience than driving in Goleta. And I called it downtown driving because the area I am referring to IS in downtown SB. So I’m not really calling it “downtown driving” so much as “SB downtown driving”, which I guess are two entirely separate entities.

2 | Posted by: Jennifer on October 05, 2005 @ 12:21 PM