6 Whimsical Observations of the Road, from a Former Lyft Driver

Ride-share driving is like immersion into a Choose Your Own Adventure book

Ample time spent out on the road as a Lyft driver had me observing a great deal.

I’d note the way cars sound like angry ducks when honking at each other.

The cavalierness of those drivers who speed and don’t signal.

The awkwardness and uncertainty confronting cars paused at roundabouts, like two pedestrians on the sidewalk who keep sidestepping each other (and yet ultimately collide regardless).

How saying yes or no to ride requests is like immersing yourself in a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Questions from the absurd to the fantastical cometed through my head: What if Uber Carriage were a thing? How is driving on freeways that split and merge similar to being a soccer goalies?

Here’s some expansion on those observations, plus additional ones.

Trying to make it through the intersection when the light’s yellow is like playing musical chairs.

Picture this (or maybe it’s actually happened to you): You find yourself stuck behind traffic in the middle of a four-way intersection. The light turns yellow, and there you are still. It’ll change to red any second now.

Lines of cars surround you on all four sides. It’s too late to back up, and your window for proceeding forward has also closed, because the cars in front of you seem to be moving at snail speed.

Shit, you despair, as the wave of anxiety begins to crest over you.

As the light counts down — Ten, nine, eight, seven — you bristle in anticipation of the chaos your obstructive presence is about to incite. You brace yourself for the onslaught of livid honks you just know people are about to unleash onto you for blocking the intersection.

Soon cars will be driving angrily around you. They’ll speed up and swerve dramatically, shooting their hands into the air to signal how much you’ve inconvenienced them.

Memories of musical chairs as a kid resurface during moments like these. I remember how my anxiety would tempt me, at times, to push the kid in front of me so that they’d move faster. Horrible, I know (but to be fair, I never actually acted on this impulse).

That’s how I feel in those intersections though. Go go go before the music stops, directed at other kids, becomes Go go go before the light turns red, directed frantically to the cars ahead of me.

It’s stressful, I’m telling you. Who else feels this too?

Uber Carriage would’ve been cute back in the day.

It’s hard to imagine life without Lyft and Uber these days. I could not escape thoughts of it even while watching Beauty and the Beast (the newest version with live actors) one night. During the scene where the Beast tells Belle she can leave the castle to go rescue her dad, my first thought was of an Uber Carriage coming to pick her up.

I pictured her receiving a text informing her of co-drivers Gaston and Emerald‘s imminent arrival. Minutes later another text would come in announcing said arrival (“Your drivers are outside”). Pulled over to the side of the dirt road below Belle’s balcony, Gaston and Emerald would then wait to transport her.

At the end of her ride, a prompt would ask Belle if she’d like to tip the duo in carrots. Only she’d get it too late, because they’ve already left, and now her only option is to tip them in useless electronic carrots, which do little to satiate Emerald’s voracious horse appetite.

Lyft drivers are like soccer goalies.

When I was a kid watching the World Cup with my family, the goalie’s behavior during penalty kicks always baffled me. I didn’t understand why he or she would sometimes leap in the direction completely opposite to where the ball was headed. The ball would pummel towards the left side of the net; the goalie would lunge to the right. And vice versa.

My dad clarified for me that because the ball travels so fast, the goalie has to choose one direction or the other before the kicker has even begun to shoot. “If he waited, it would already be too late. So he picks randomly,” he explained.

This made sense. I then imagined how stressful and scary it must feel for the goalie to be in charge of stopping a ball that’s coming at them so fast, with no way to predict its trajectory. A lot of it — maybe even all of it, actually — seems based on luck.

Approaching a sudden fork in the freeway when driving Lyft in unfamiliar areas brought up similar feelings in me as I imagine that penalty kicks bring up for goalies–in that choosing one road over the other requires quick, instinctual action over more deliberate and conscious thought.

Sometimes the freeway signs don’t coincide with Siri’s directions, so with little time to think rationally, I pick one randomly — and it’s not always the right one. Half the time I’m wrong.

Both the driver’s and the goalie’s predicament might end in relief (in the the goalie’s case, ball clutched against her chest, euphoric at having thwarted the other team from winning; in the Lyft driver’s, hands resting easy against the steering wheel, comforted by the awareness that she and her passenger remain successfully en route to their correct destination.

Or they might end in stress (goalie: “I just doomed my team;” Lyft driver: “My passenger and I are now on our way to Hayward.”)

Nowadays the image of a goalie diving to the wrong side of the soccer net springs to mind whenever I find myself at a fork in the freeway, forced to pick a direction. The camaraderie I feel with goalies in these moments is one that I never would have anticipated, considering I lasted only one day as goalie for my own soccer team when a kid.

Virtual fist pump to Hope Solo, Kasey Keller, and Oliver Kahn. This former Lyft driver over here sees you all. She feels your struggle.

The awkward car interaction at roundabouts is like the bashful dance of two pedestrians nearly colliding on the sidewalk.

You know that uncomfortable dance you do when you’re walking and almost collide with another pedestrian on the sidewalk? And then you’re not sure whether to go left or right after? And the two of you keep accidentally choosing the same direction and repeatedly almost bumping into each other for at least a minute or two, or more?

In attempt to get around, you both move to the right; then to the left; then to the right again– all the while continuing to inadvertently block each other while blushing and apologizing (it sort of looks like the two of you are dancing even, but awkwardly).

I noticed that dance taking place on the road between cars one week.

When driving I reached a roundabout. Four other cars and I were stopped in our respective corners. No one knew who should go, and so we all inched forth gingerly and jerkily; in fits and starts.

Start, stop. Start, stop.

One car that was about to go would see that another car was also about to go, and so the two would brake at the same time.

“Everyone’s just a little confused,” said the passenger in my backseat.

When this dance happens with people, sometimes cute stories result from it, or a silver lining will emerge — like maybe the two bumpees end up married, or the spilled drink resulting from the collision turned out to be full of harmful ingredients that the person was better off not ingesting, or the stain left behind improves the shirt’s appearance, lending it more of an avant-garde touch.

When it happens between cars though, it’s a little more anxiety-provoking. Because let’s just say a bit more is at stake.

“Oh no, you go;” “oh no, you go;” “oh no please, you go.” Eventually one driver says, “well okay I guess I will,” at the same time another driver says the exact same thing.

And then BAM.

The “on the road” equivalent to the awkward dance between pedestrians could very likely result in totaled cars and crumpled metal in the middle of a crowded city street. Perturbed drivers maneuvering around the scene of destruction, some livid at the delay in their already traffic-congested commute home.

Similar as they may be in their shared uncertainty and displays of earnestness, I don’t think we’ll get any meet cute stories out of this one.

Driving is like immersing yourself into a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book.

Any readers remember those books from the ’90s?

Here’s an excerpt from one: “If you decide to look at the corpse, turn to page 88. If you think you should tell Nada it’s time to talk to Mr. Hatama about the bizarre events, turn to page 124.”

Another: “To take Mac’s soda along with you, risking teeth-rotting, caffeine headaches, and messy, sticky bike wrecks, turn to page 18. Also, it will probably make you wet your bed. To take Micah’s delicious, all-natural Fruit Shoot and drink with no mess on your way to help Brad, turn to page 27.” LOL.

Driving Lyft feels like a 3D, real-life game of Choose Your Own Adventure, where accepting a request from Leon is like turning to page 24, where you’ll brave the traffic of downtown San Francisco. Accepting one from Marsha is like flipping to 100 where the city scenes will change to farmland on an hours long journey.

Like in a video game, with Lyft and Uber there are also “points” to be collected at the end of every mission (in the form of money and tips). Also like in a video game, every ride leads you to the possibility of traversing new territory — be it the citified East Oakland level, the “verdant green hills of Dublin” course, or the beach one.

There’s a simultaneous thrill in the unknown and anticipatory element that feels similar to what Ashton Kutcher’s character might have felt in Butterfly Effect — knowing that saying yes or no to any one request will inform the entire sequence of rides to follow. For example, accepting a request from Ryan to Livermore will result in a completely different line-up of riders and scenery than accepting one from Jenny to San Francisco would have.

This dilemma is especially present when requests from both the Lyft and Uber apps come in at the same time, forcing you to rapidly weigh the pros and cons between each before the ten second window of decision-making closes.

Cars are animals and the road’s a jungle.

From even just a few feet above, we resemble colorful bugs, scuttling from one point to another (maybe glittering ones too, depending on the lighting and time of day). At peak traffic times we’re like rabid ants– stopping, starting, and scurrying in disarrayed confused.

The car who beeped his horn while huffily speeding past another is a sassy, impatient squirrel.

Those bigger trucks — especially the ones carrying piles of precariously stacked items in their posteriors — are scary, unbalanced hippos.

And those creatures that lazily slide into another car-animal’s lane without using their turn signal are squinty-eyed ducks that have smoked a lot of weed (“Oh hey, is this okay?” I imagine them saying with eyes half closed as they pull that crap on you).

A slow, meandering, animal complains there’s too much noise around him, while the destructive speedster cheetah gripes of too much incompetence– then glares up at us in the hover car because he too just wants to be above it all.

Cops are like sharks in that their presence seems to subdue all the nearby animals.

The road can be a stressful place. Next time you’re stuck in traffic, see what whimsical observations pop into your head to (help) enliven the experience. You may just find yourself making eye contact with a goose in the car next to you.