Well, it happened.

But not to me, thank goodness.

I drive in to work on a residential street that has a large apartment complex. There are other ways I could drive in but they are less direct and take longer, and still require me to "thread the needle" between parked cars occasionally.

This residential street, the one with the apartment complex, is NOT a good street for people to park in the street on. It is not wide and it has several hills and bends where you can't exactly see what's coming. But because the apartment complex was built at a time when they expected couples or families to live there, they put in too few parking spaces in lots - assuming that each apartment would have only one, or at most, two cars associated with it. But then, things changed, and instead of mostly living in dorms, students wanted to live in apartments. And to save money, they'd rent a two-bedroom and put four or sometimes six people in there - and now, each of those people has a car.

(I didn't have a car when I was in college. But then again, I lived in Ann Arbor where most everything I wanted (with the exception of a supermarket; there were small groceries but the large supermarkets were outside of town) was within fairly easy walking distance. And anyway, walking was my exercise and also a way to decompress. But here, it's hard to walk very many places, especially from campus: there are not sidewalks, things are more spread out (there's no campus town), and much of the year the weather is not pleasant to walk in).

Anyway, there are more cars than there are spaces, so people park out on the street. Which effectively reduces the residential street to one lane, and every morning I drive into work I do so slowly and carefully and hoping that no one comes barrelling down the hill coming the opposite direction without time for them to stop or me to slide over into a gap between parked cars (if there even is one).

I've had a couple of close calls, mostly coming DOWN the street from work and meeting up with someone driving into my lane.I fully expect some day there will be a head on collision, if there hasn't been already.

Well, this morning, driving in, I saw people clustered around a car, and another car stopped (blocking the street, but they got out of the way). Apparently the car people were looking at had been BADLY sideswiped; the driver's door was all bashed in. (There was a car parked right in front of it with its lights still on, so I wonder if that was the car that did it).

I feel bad for the people whose car got damaged, but....that's a risk of parking in the street. (I used to live in those apartments, my first two years here. I always managed to find a spot in the lot but then again I almost always got home for the day before 9 pm and I get the feeling it's the late-return people who get stuck with parking in the street). The ideal thing would be for the apartment owners to build another lot but I don't see that happening....