My fridge was empty, so I went on a grocery run late Friday afternoon, Feb. 13. On my way back from Sprouts in Oakland, I stopped at the corner of Broadway and 27th and waited for the light to change. It turned green and I proceeded across Broadway moving east on 27th towards home. There was a man in a blue jacket walking a small dog in the crosswalk on my right and slightly behind me.
A postal worker driving west on 27th turned left to go south on Broadway. He came towards me as I crossed, swinging behind me a bit too close for comfort. I was annoyed, but one gets used to such things. What I didn't realize until I heard the driver of the mail truck yell "move" was that he was heading directly for the man with his dog.
"Move" isn't something you yell when it's an accidental oversight.
I stopped at the far corner and looked behind me. The man walking his dog raised his hand, as if to say "don't kill me!" and got out of the way. The postal driver blew through the crosswalk. I yelled, "Are you f*cking serious!" towards the driver, but he was already speeding south down Broadway; I doubt he heard me.
There weren't any cars coming straight across 27th that were close (just a few in the turning pocket). So the postal driver was acting out of reckless impatience, not some miscalculation while trying to squeeze through a break in traffic.
I have front and rear-facing safety cameras on my bike (the incident was caught by my tail camera). But I realized there was no way my cameras could have captured the driver's face. The main Oakland post office was on my way home. So I diverted slightly from my intended route and took Webster Street, which parallels Broadway, and then hung out for a minute or two on the corner of Jackson and 12th. Sure enough, the same postal truck circled the block down Jackson a minute later, turned down 12th, and parked. That graffiti was pretty hard to miss. So I nonchalantly waited on the sidewalk until the driver got out of the truck so I could take a picture of him with my cell phone.
He came around to open the side door of his truck. Note his phone is in his left hand, which is where it was when he drove up.
Some readers may be thrown by the pink graffiti on the driver's side of his truck and the yellow markings on the passenger side. For more clarity that this was indeed the same truck, my bike's front safety camera got a brief shot of the passenger side right before the incident, when I approached the intersection of Broadway and 27th. Note the yellow graffiti appears a bit different because of the lighting and the different cameras, but it's unmistakably the same truck.
When I got home, I filed a complaint on the US Postal Service website and sent them the lead image. I got a file number and some generic email with "We will look into this incident with the carrier and will do our investigation" from a customer service rep with the Oakland office. I can imagine many Streetsblog readers are already snickering: for the record, I have zero expectation that an "investigation," let alone disciplinary action, will take place.
But at least now, when this guy runs somebody down, maybe this article will get discovered. I've never believed that when an egregious driver kills or mangles someone, it just happens to be the first time they drove irresponsibly. To me, one of the reasons we have so many deadly collisions is because people are permitted to drive recklessly until—and often even after—they really hurt or kill someone. Our colleagues at CalMatters have documented the way the California DMV all-but-never does anything about dangerous drivers. But publicizing this incident might at least help with a civil suit someday.
Of course, scenes such as this play out all day long in the Bay Area. I'll never understand why it is tolerated. If I walked down the sidewalk waving a baseball bat at people and yelling "move" at anybody who slowed my progress, I'd be locked up. But when it comes to cars, it's just completely normalized. It's wild that our car-brain culture evolved to allow it.
As to the post office, I don't mean to single them out. But if they're concerned that I called out and published a picture of an employee, maybe they should do something about Oakland's blight and clean and repaint their vehicles occasionally so they're not so freakin' easy to identify. More importantly, their workers shouldn't menace and endanger a random person walking a dog because they're too impatient to wait five seconds.
