More often than not when I’m in San Francisco I make the mistake of having a car with me. Someone once estimated that at any given moment of a typical day in San Francisco a third of the cars in the city are looking for parking. Of course there is now an app for that and I discovered with a bit of scrolling that the patch of road opposite the location of the SF Salon the following day had free parking except for two hours of street cleaning each week. The street I was staying on had a two hour maximum during the day. And I found a spot near the studio where I was recording my Guardian podcast interview in Berkeley with a three hour limit. Solo travel can be tiring because you’ve got no one to argue with about what to do each day and when. But my mild obsessional tendencies mixed with my unwillingness to pay for parking had successfully mapped out my time. Not a self-driving car. More a car-driven self.
