What Were They Thinking?

If you've been reading my posts, you will remember that a woman crashed into my next-door neighbor's garage door, crushing it, as she attempted a U-turn in a small space. She leaves me asking a question that was renewed by another driver today.  

I live on a skinny little street that looks like a one-way alley where cars can only park along one side.  It's maybe 10 feet wide, 12 at most.  Yet, people routinely try to make U-turns on the street.  The woman who bashed into the garage was trying to make a U-turn.  From cross street to cross street, the block itself is short.  It's not a long journey to get to the next street, which, by the way is four lanes wide, a very wide avenue where you can turn around all day long and never crash into anything.  The nearby avenue looks like an airport runway, enormously long and wonderfully wide.  From my house to that avenue is a distance of about 50 yards.  A mediocre baseball player could throw a ball to the stop sign without too much effort.

In the past eight months, two cars have made a mess of turning around, one hitting my car, and the other the aforementioned bash job on my neighbor's garage.  As a matter of fact, the person who hit my car was driving a very large sedan that, when perpendicular to the street itself, had about one foot of extra length to move back or forward.

So, apparently, both drivers were coming up the street and, for God's sake, decided to turn around and go back.  Just had to turn, could not go the next 50 feet and take a left or right on The Huge Avenue, and both crashed into something.  Whammo!

Just a little while ago, I looked out the window down to the street and, lo and behold, a woman in a late-model large blue sedan was making a U-turn in the middle of the street, very close to my parked car.  What the heck?  I think I'll go outside and look for some kind of diversion device that repels cars backwards and into my car and our garage doors.  Could it be that large sedans just quit going forward on the street and must be turned back downhill mid stream?  The hill is a goose bump compared with the monstrously steep avenues and streets in San Francisco.  I've seen cars go up them like arrows shot out of bow, straight up without any hesitation.  The same cars on my street stop and go back where they came from.  Why?  I want to know why!

I would never go so far as to say people are logical as they drive.  Most of the time they are not even close.  Drivers are sleeping, texting, drinking, talking, painting their toenails (I've seen it), daydreaming, and who knows what else.  Definitely, they are not thinking, especially on my skinny street that goes nowhere.  I'd hate to think what would happen if I actually painted a target on my garage door, but I am pondering the idea of reverse psychology...