The Wise Drive

Q: Lately I’ve seen a lot of motorcycles parking in the hashed area adjacent to posted handicapped parking spaces. I’ve always understood that the hashed area was part of the handicapped parking space to allow room for persons getting into and out of vehicles. Is parking in the hashed area a handicapped parking violation or just rude?

A: It’s not just rude (I mean, it is rude, but not just that.) The law states that it’s an infraction to “stop, stand, or park in, block, or otherwise make inaccessible the access aisle located next to a space reserved for persons with physical disabilities.” Maybe the motorcyclists thought they found a loophole. They didn’t. But even if they had, a loophole is often the term for justifying poor behavior to gain an advantage.

Compelling a person with mobility challenges to navigate around your motorcycle isn’t an example of beating the system; it’s an example of being a nincompoop (and I’m not generally one to use harsh language) to a person who was supposed to be supported by the system. All for a parking spot.

Why are so many people obsessed with getting a “good” parking spot? And I put good in quotes because I think we’ve got the metrics wrong. Or more accurately, we’re basing what’s good on only one metric: how close the parking spot is to the door we intend to enter.

If you have mobility challenges, proximity to your destination ranks high when finding a parking spot. For everyone else, the parking spot closest to the entrance is often not the best one. Presumably, people want those close parking spots because it makes their walk quicker. But it’s also the area with more congestion, increased potential for fender-benders, and a generally worse mental and emotional experience.

Park further away and you might find that you can pull through one stall and into the next so that when it’s time to leave you don’t have to back out of a parking stall. According to AAA, 91 percent of parking lot collisions involve backing up.

Further out, you’re more likely to find a parking spot with an empty stall next to you. That makes getting out of and into your car easier and is a clear advantage if you need to load anything through your car doors, especially if it’s too big to fit in the trunk.

Parking close doesn’t guarantee any time savings. Maybe you’ve had the experience of seeing a car waiting for a supposedly good parking spot. Meanwhile, you park a few stalls further away without a wait and end up walking into the store while the other driver is finally pulling into their stall.

How much time does it cost you to park a bit further out? A standard parking stall ranges from eight-and-a-half to nine feet wide. Humans have a range of walking speeds so your actual time will vary, but using four feet per second (the speed traffic engineers often use when calculating pedestrian travel times), parking five stalls further out would add eleven seconds to your walk to the store.

Once you’re willing to trade eleven seconds for less parking hassle, you can apply that to driving too. Letting someone merge in front of you will take about three seconds. Waiting for a safe time to pass a cyclist might be ten or fifteen seconds. A small price for becoming a better human.

Returning back where we started, to any motorcyclists tempted to park in the aisle for disabled parking, it’s not legal, and you might get called a nincompoop in the newspaper.

Q: It’s clearly dangerous to talk on the phone while driving, and it makes sense that we have a law against it, but why are the police allowed to do it?

A: The longer cell phones are around, the more we all agree that they don’t mix well with driving. According to AAA surveys, in 2009, 58 percent of us thought that drivers talking on their phones were a serious threat. By 2014, 66 percent of us thought it was unacceptable, and in 2023, 78 percent of us thought it was very dangerous. The remaining 22 percent thought it was slightly or somewhat dangerous; nobody put it in the ‘not dangerous at all’ category. It’s hard to ignore all the evidence (in the form of crashes), and our attitudes toward distracted driving have shifted to reflect that (including 78 percent of Washington drivers who support enforcement of distracted driving).

In Washington, 20 percent of fatal crashes are reported to involve distraction. But the real number is most certainly higher. In contrast to some other risk factors, it’s tough for a collision investigator to know if a driver was distracted. For example, an impaired driver can be confirmed with a breath or blood test. So far, we don’t have a blood test to prove distraction, and not all distracted drivers involved in a crash are going to admit to it.

Naturalistic driving studies have found that the odds of crashing double while talking on the phone. And talking is the least of the problems. Reaching for a ringing phone increases crash risk almost five times, and you’re twelve times more likely to crash while dialing a number.

Even so, there are a few folks who will claim they’re the exception, because they’re good at multi-tasking. No, you’re not. In fact, multi-tasking isn’t a real thing. Our brains don’t do two things at the same time; they switch between them. When your brain moves from one task to another there are switching costs, measured in increased errors.

And yet, as you mentioned, there are exceptions in our distracted driving law, and not just for the police. The law does not apply to drivers using their phones to contact emergency services, transit drivers calling their dispatch with time-sensitive information, and emergency responders.

That doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all for emergency responders. Police, fire, and other emergency response agencies have organization policies that limit when drivers are allowed to use their phones and other in-vehicle technology distractions. For example, here’s an excerpt of a police department policy: “Officers operating emergency vehicles should restrict the use of these devices to matters of an urgent nature and should, where practicable, stop the vehicle at an appropriate location to use the PCD (personal communications device).”

Nationally, there have been too many examples of the consequences of distracted driving by bus drivers and emergency responders, resulting in serious injuries and deaths. Both drivers and their agencies have faced multi-million-dollar lawsuits for events when drivers ignored, and agencies failed to enforce, their distracted driving policies.

The law both recognizes the risk of using a phone while driving and makes limited provisions for when it might be worth the risk. Many organizations aren’t willing to take that risk, and have phone use policies that are stricter than the law. As an example, King County Metro prohibits all phone use while driving, even though state law permits a driver to call their dispatch. As I’ve said before, following the law is the minimum requirement; it isn’t always best practice. Where the law is weak, organizations can, and should, set higher standards.

Q: I live in a neighborhood with some two-way roadways that, when cars are parked on the side of the road, are too narrow for cars approaching each other from opposite directions to pass. Who has to yield when there are cars parked on one side and not the other?

A: I used to think that what you’ve described was a problem. Now I think it might be a feature. Sure, it’s a little inconvenient to drive through a neighborhood with narrow roads, but maybe that same inconvenience makes it a better place to live.

Continue reading “Navigating Narrow Neighborhood Streets”

A: On my daily walks I’ve noticed a large increase in outdated license tabs, some of them for more than a year. Is there a fine for not renewing? It doesn’t seem fair as I thought our State needs the money for our infrastructure.

A: If you ask a traffic safety guy about revenue, you’re probably not going to get the answer you’re looking for. Yes, there is a fine for not renewing, and yes, our state needs money for infrastructure. But what I really want to know is, do drivers of unregistered vehicles crash more often? And to go even broader, let’s take a look at what I’m calling the ‘uns’: unlicensed, untrained, uninsured, and unregistered.

Continue reading “The Crash Risk of an Unregistered Vehicle”

Q: I saw a, I’m not sure what you’d call it. Imagine the front half of a motorcycle attached to the back half of an old VW bug. It got me wondering, how much can you modify a vehicle before you’re required to get some sort of approval to drive it on the road?

A: One good indicator that it needs approval is when you don’t know what it is. Is it a 1972 VW Beetle or a 1987 Yamaha Virago? The law would call that a homemade vehicle, described in part as, “A vehicle that has been constructed by using major component parts from one or more manufactured vehicles and cannot be identified as a specific make and model.” A homemade vehicle can also be, and this seems like it in the purest sense, “A vehicle that has been constructed entirely from homemade parts and materials not obtained from other vehicles.”

Continue reading “Driving a Homemade Vehicle”

Q: Is it just me, or is aggressive driving and road rage getting worse?

A: How bad is road rage in Washington? If you’ve been the victim of it, pretty bad, for sure. And from a broader perspective, the fact that it occurs frequently enough to have a clever name suggests that it’s far too prevalent. But it’s not as easy as you’d think to put a number on it.

You’re not going to find a Washington law called ‘road rage’. In most states it’s not a legal term; historically it’s been a journalistic one, and we don’t have an agreed-upon meaning. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) defines it as, “An intentional assault by a driver or passenger with a motor vehicle or a weapon that occurs on the roadway or is precipitated by an incident on the roadway.”

Other definitions include committing a crime, violent anger, or aggressive behavior. If we’re trying to track road rage events, do we count every time someone angrily shakes a fist at another driver, only when one driver assaults another driver, or somewhere in between?

Continue reading “Road Rage and Aggressive Driving”

Q: I know it’s illegal to have an open container of alcohol in a car, so why is a limo allowed to have a bar?

A: Before I answer your question, I have one of my own: Why would we craft a law that makes it illegal to have an open container of alcohol in a vehicle (assuming it’s not the driver that’s holding it, of course)? Prior to 1983, Washington didn’t have an open container law, but as Bob Dylan sang two decades earlier, the times, they were a-changin’.

Continue reading “Drinking in a Limousine”