Editing Blog/2025-02-20/Car Breakdowns in SF (section)

== Mid-Road Stop ==
[[File:Screenshot Google Street View - 7th and Howard.png|thumb|They were stopped one car length from the intersection in the second lane from the left]]
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.