Yes, after a hiatus of something like three weeks, during which time the sorts of people who call into radio shows at 10am on a Monday morning no doubt forgot I exist, the Bike Snob show returned to the airwaves today–and you can listen here:
I’d say my favorite caller was the guy who wouldn’t admit that if you continue to lend your car to someone who manages to rack up 15 speed camera tickets inside of a 12-month period then you’re a complete idiot.
In fact, as I rode home, I thought more about this. Basically, if you can’t be bothered to listen to the show, we passed a law in New York City that says if you manage to get 15 speed camera tickets or five red light camera tickets inside of a 12-month period you have to take a driver safety course, and if you fail to do so then the NYC Sheriff (yessir, we city slickers got us a sheriff) can impound your car.
Anyway, this guy called in to say (I’m paraphrasing), “But what if you’re not the driver? That’s not fair!” To this I replied (I’m paraphrasing), “If you lend your car to someone, they get a speeding ticket while using it, and you not only keep lending it to them but the cycle repeats itself 15 more times then you shouldn’t be entrusted with a fucking Chia Pet let alone a car and you’re goddamn right you should have to take a course.”
By the way, if you’re one of these people who’s anti-speed camera because ‘Murcia and freedom or whatever, keep in mind it’s really hard to get a speed camera ticket in New York City because you have to be going more than 10mph over the speed limit in order to trip one. Of course even that wide margin of error is not good enough for some people; for example, in the comments section on Gothamist or something I saw someone arguing that (I’m paraphrasing) “If you put snow tires on your car it can mess with your speedometer calibration and you might not know you’re speeding,” to which I can only reply, “That’s your fucking problem.” (Not to mention absolutely nobody in New York City uses snow tires, which is why they crash their cars the second a few flurries start falling.) I mean if you fucked around with your car so much it threw the speedometer off by more than 10mph then the $50 ticket you got in the mail is a relatively cheap notice that you’d better fix that shit. (Or at least tape a Garmin to your dashboard so you can track your speed via GPS.)
In any case, as I explain to the caller, I myself got a speed camera ticket after lending my car to someone, and as I also explained (I’m paraphrasing), “That shit was still my problem.” What I didn’t explain to the caller was that way back when I was a teenager I was in the local video store with an older friend who very much wanted to rent a pornographic movie and asked me to borrow my membership card to do so. In fact, I still remember the name of the movie; it was called “T*tf*ckers.” (A title like that tends to stick in your mind.) Moreover, to this day I have a very clear image of my friend’s visage as he beseeched me to rent the tape, squinting due to the smoke from the cigarette dangling from his mouth and mischievously repeating the word “T*tf*ckers!” over and over again as he exuberantly shoved the box in my face.
To my credit, I had the wherewithal to refrain from allowing my friend to rent the tape. Why? Because I knew he would never return it, and that one day my mother would go to rent a movie from the local video store on our family account and the clerk would inform her, “Uh, sorry, I’m showing that ‘T*tf*ckers’ is two weeks overdue.”
So I ask you: if teenage me (and I was as dumb a teenager as they come, believe me) could not only resist the siren call of “T*tf*ckers” but also have enough foresight to anticipate the negative consequences of renting it on my family account, is it not reasonable to expect that car owners to exercise discretion when lending others their motor vehicles?
Of course it is.