Blog/2025-02-20/Car Breakdowns in SF
I've been in a lot of incidents where strangers have had to help me and I'm always interested in a story so I often find myself stopping by the roadside to help out folks that I see. For some reason, when I've done this in the Bay Area I've always encountered something amusing. So here are three of the stories that I remember.
Mid-Road Stop[edit]
In San Francisco, double-parking is the norm. Hit your hazard lights and you can stop wherever you want. But it's usually unusual to see someone stopped in the second lane from the left when the leftmost lane is empty.
One day I was driving up 7th when I encountered precisely this. Traffic was flowing smoothly and then suddenly hit a snag near Howard. As I drove by I saw a car completely stopped about a car length before the stop line at the signal. Two young black women were seated in the car on their phones, surprisingly undistressed considering the traffic that was pausing, honking, and driving around them.
This being rather unusual, I found a parking spot on the next block and walked back to their car and asked them what was up and whether their car was in trouble, only to find that they'd run out of fuel.
This is two blocks from two gas stations (and back then, maybe three) so the whole thing was perplexing to me, but there they were. So I volunteered that they'd probably be better off with on the side of the road rather than right in the middle.
At this point, I figured one of them would get out of the car but seeing as they didn't and I'd offered to help I started pushing from the driver's side, telling them which way to turn and so on so that we could cross the intersection and get into a parking spot on 7th on the other side since there was no room on the South side. Unfortunately for me, Howard has quite a bit of a camber through that intersection and I was losing some steam pushing the car up and over and I was on the verge of having to let it roll backwards!
If it wasn't bad enough that I was going to have to give up going over the hump (which would be tremendously embarrassing), I heard a commotion behind me somewhere. This place used to have a large number of homeless people in tents and whatnot so I wasn't looking forward to having to fend one off while simultaneously getting this car across before the light changed. This particular guy was sprinting across the road to get to me and when he was close I finally made out what he was saying "Don't stop, man! I got you!". Together, he and I managed to get the car nicely and neatly into the parking spot. As soon as it was in, he ran away yelling "No problem, dude!".
Having been visited by the car fairy, I decided to push my luck and ask them if they'd called anyone for help. One of them told me that her husband was coming to help them, which made sense, from Sacramento, which made none since it was 2 hours away! After a little more conversation, it turned out that they had an empty gas can in the boot. This made the decision to just sit in the car and wait for 2 hours even more outrageous!
After this, things went smoothly. One of them came with me in my car to the gas station where she put a gallon or so in the can. I took her back, she poured it in the car, and it started right up. I gave them instructions to get back to the gas station, hoped that the 20 miles or so that the gas can bought them would be sufficient in the half square mile space they were working with, and went onward to go see my friends.
On/Off? Split the Difference[edit]
I used to live in Glen Park, up in the hills. One of the ways to get back there was to take the Monterey Blvd off-ramp from 280 and then drive up the back. The on-ramp and off-ramp split off Monterey Boulevard and have a small median to separate them. I always thought it was quite low. Apparently it's low and tapered enough that someone could find themselves stuck on it if they tried to enter the freeway.
I discovered this one day on my way home when I saw car with its nose in the air and its front wheels spinning wildly. I stopped my car by the side of road as others had and together we all pushed until the car got off the median with a crunching sound.
Surprisingly, the driver was completely sober from what I could see. He didn't smell of weed or alcohol though he did seem rather tired. He thanked us, we said our no-problems and all turned to our cars to go back when we heard another crunching sound, turned around, and all watched as the car stood perched on top of the median again! This time it wasn't so bad, though, and he managed to get it off by reversing since one wheel was still touching the road.
Please! No Police![edit]
On a third occasion, I was back at that very same on-ramp when I saw a minivan that was stopped right next to the median there. Traffic was going around it so it was only blocking one of the lanes that merged into the on-ramp. But as usual, I was curious, so I walked up to the window and asked what was up.
This time it was actually worse. The car was simply not responding. No power. No starter turning over, nothing. Usually this means the battery's dead, but for a car that was actually running enough to get it there? Strange.
The driver, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, seemed somewhat distressed but I managed to calm her down and tell her that we could push it to the side of the street and then call a mechanic or a tow truck. Now that she was calm, I was just about to push the car when I saw some California Highway Patrol driving by a little down one of the other streets and said "Oh, the police! They'll help." and started waving to catch their attention.
This really scared her, though. She went "Please, no police, no police!" and I honestly felt awful but it was too late. They'd already seen me and started down towards me with the lights on. I was surprised with the brusqueness they employed to what I thought was a completely innocuous scene: a middle-aged woman with a broken car. They gave me the whole "do you know the driver of the vehicle?" bureaucratese and other such questions and then asked me to move away.
So I went back and sat in my car to see what would happen, and to be honest, nothing of interest did. They seemed to call a tow and that was it. Now that I think about it, perhaps the better thing to do would have been to push the car to the curb and call a mechanic. The tow yards charge an arm and a leg. Welp, I guess I fucked up. Poor lady!
