Homeless in Vancouver: Driver side mirror─'nother one bites the dust

About an hour ago I was paused in the westbound lane of 10th Avenue at Oak Street waiting on a green light.

I heard a satisfying crunching sound and saw that a cube van coming toward me, northbound on Oak, must have trimmed a parked black SUV.

Sure enough, the Volkswagen SUV’s driver side mirror was a broken, dangling thing.

If your ass is still in traffic, you're not really parked

The van’s driver had kept going but only far enough to find a parking spot. Back he came on foot, carrying a clipboard, a pen, paper, and a tape measure.

Professional truck drivers need to know the footprint of their vehicle—necessary if they’re going to maneuver the back alleys—and this driver was professional enough to come back to the scene of the accident. And the tape measure meant that he was sure he had been inside his lane.

Sure enough, the SUV was parked a full 19 inches from the curb.

Admittedly it’s becoming more and more common to see vehicles parked this far and farther from the curb (often on an angle) but that doesn’t make it right.

All the people who park their wide-ass SUVs so far from the curb put their own vehicles at risk even as they pose a hazard to oncoming traffic.

And what can I say, I’m a cyclist. Cube van, badly parked SUV and me—that’s a recipe for roadkill.

The van’s driver, who had very imperfect English but otherwise was perfectly professional and polite, left a sheet of paper with his phone number tucked under the SUV’s passenger side windshield wiper.