Bike parking fail

If you live in a city you've more likely than not been thwarted by some moron who left a car parked smack in the middle of curb-space ample for two blimped-up SUVs -- Escalades, even -- hogging the only open spot anyplace near where you need to park.

WTF, you wondered, perhaps out loud. Perhaps even at the top of your lungs. Was the driver an idiot? A narcissist? An arrogant toff with delusions of royal prerogative?

You don't actually care about the particulars. Really, you don't. The particulars aren't the problem. The fact at the side of the road is the problem.

What you want to do is smash the asshat's windshield. But you're not about to stoop that low. Besides, smashing windshields, even asshats' windshields, can get a person ... entangled. So you grit your teeth. You take a deep breath. You circle the block. You circle the block again.

But ask yourself this:

Self, have you ever run across a parking fail like the one depicted in the photo below?

I hadn't.

Not so blatant a case of two-wheeled vehiculum porcus, not in decades of bike commuting in a city filled with bike commuters. Not nearly.

But there it is, not so much in black and white as in gunmetal grey and fire-engine red.

There were other open spaces in the YMCA bike racks in Berkeley the other evening. Heck, you can see one in the photo, just to the right of the yellow bicycle.

But.

Still.

What kind of epsilon-minus semi-moron would park a bike to take up space that four could have used?

If you'd ridden to the gym after work, looked for a place to park your bike, and found ... the scene depicted above ... what would you have done?

Let the air out of the red bike's tires? Poured crazy-glue over its derailleur? Removed the gel-filled form-fitting saddle and replaced the seatpost with a splintery-tipped broken broom handle?

Or would you simply have taken a photo and given the world at large a chance to marvel at the self-involved idiocy among us?



Related posts on One Finger Typing:

Sharrows and stripes: bike lanes for a common good
Fixing flat tires