WHAT’S THE POINT?
As the song goes, “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy.” Maybe when you don’t have to deal with tourists, out-of-school kids, and harried moms who are busy trying to schedule a “play date” for their kids while trying to park what was once a troop-moving vehicle into a space designed for a compact car.
Summertime means kids out of school, foreign nationals — especially the ones from Texas — and shortened tempers as the heat rises. It means congestion for us on the coast, and an opportunity to learn and practice patience.
I say this because of the happy fact that with summer comes all the headaches of traffic jams for this little burg on the bay. For the surrounding area, summer usually means less traffic but for us, with all of our attractions and heavy dependence on tourism for our local economy, summer means more people, more cars, more parking lot brain death and more people generally being unaware of their surroundings.
Memorial Day we were coming down the PCH and we stopped at the light in front of Gladstone’s. I was the front car so I had a perfect view of what happened: The left turn arrow became green and a stream of cars from PCH north made the turn into Gladstone’s. As usual with most drivers, they weren’t looking beyond their noses and couldn’t see that the parking valets were backed up and that the cars were snaking back out the driveway.
The last car to make the left turn was obviously not paying attention to the fact that she was going to have to wait a long time to get into the parking lot to drop off her car and made the left anyway. The problem was that when she did that, she blocked two lanes of traffic on PCH.
Now before the gender police come out and attack me, I don’t think it is just because she was a woman that she made the bonehead move. I’ve seen men do the same thing and just as often. I think it happened because she was not paying attention to where she was going. She wasn’t looking down the road to see what awaited her; she was only concerned with having a green arrow to turn on and wasn’t thinking about the effect her turning would have on the flow of traffic.
People don’t think about traffic flow much. For example, my boyfriend had the bad fortune to be traveling up Wilshire Boulevard at 5 p.m. last week. He drives a Mini Cooper so he can’t always see as far as he’d like down the road but for this story, it was the other driver that couldn’t see. The other driver was in one of those troop-moving vehicles so clearly he could see over the roof of the Mini, however, he was on the phone and living by the green light, not by the movement of traffic. He couldn’t see that traffic was crawling.
As each green light would occur, my boyfriend would wait to see if the traffic in front of him moved, if it was clear for him to go through the intersection he would move up, if not, he didn’t. He did this all to the accompaniment of the horn of the troop mover behind him, and each time he had a green light he didn’t move because it would block traffic more.
Now anyone who has driven on Wilshire Boulevard at rush hour knows that the traffic doesn’t flow but sputters. There is a stop-start dance that goes on which is fairly independent of the traffic lights. The driver of the troop mover could clearly see over the roof of the Mini, and could certainly have noticed that even with a green light, all that moving would do would put them in the middle of the intersection, 15 feet ahead of where they sat, and then the troop mover would block at least two lanes of traffic — if not more.
Again, I have seen this behavior in both men and women, and the root problem is not the gender of the driver, but their attention, or lack thereof, to the roads. It has everything to do with focus and nothing to do with physiology.
We can’t make other people better drivers, more aware of their surroundings and more conscious of their effect on others. We can be more aware ourselves and by practicing some simple tips that we should have learned in high school, we can help improve the traffic in our burg on the bay.
This summer, there are sure to be temporary changes to our roadways as traffic officers re-route people for parking at the concerts on the pier, as the summer tourism increases, and as the tremendous amount of construction that is happening continues to snarl traffic. There are sure to be tempers flying, and confused and unaware drivers who have come from as near as Mid-Wilshire and as far as India.
By paying attention to the roads ourselves, perhaps we can reduce the snarls and snarling. Yes, if you don’t immediately move on the green light, some jerk — male or female — is likely to stand on their horn alerting you to the fact that you have the right of way to proceed but that doesn’t mean you have the obligation to move into a clogged intersection and further complicate matters. The jerk behind you likely hasn’t looked beyond your bumper to see that there are others on the road besides themselves and you. (David Pisarra is a business development lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664-9969.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 6, 2006. Read the original PDF.