After KRON4's Stanley "People Behaving Badly" Roberts posted video on his Facebook page of a guy riding a bike on the Bay Bridge, he was flooded with other clips of terrible Bay Bridge behavior, he tells SFist. Chief among them was a YouTube video, excerpted below, which shows two GoCar drivers risking life and limb as they take their tiny vehicles onto the structure.
You know what GoCars are. They're those wackily minuscule open vehicles a certain type of tourist drives around, as a recorded voice tells them where they are and why they, as visitors, should find it relevant.
To say that they're not high-performance driving machines is to phrase it kindly. As SFist contributor Beth Spotswood put it when she tried one out:
To drive a GoCar is basically like driving a hybrid of a motorcycle and a golf cart. The brakes are in the obvious place, but it’s two pedals for both of your feet that you have to slam down simultaneously. And even then, the GoCar takes 10 or so feet to fully stop. You rev the gas by twisting the right handlebar forward, and there was a laminated map chained to the dashboard...Maintaining any kind of normal speed was hard, braking was nearly impossible and changing lanes? From a foot off the ground and a quarter the size of any other car? It was like a roller coaster and no one was in charge.
And yet, Roberts reports, these (presumed) visitors to SF felt safe enough to drive one on the Bay Bridge, an act that GoCar says renters are repeatedly told they must never, never perform.
These drivers, however, seem to believe that their GoCar isn't just bridge-worthy, it's also a great thing to drive on the sidewalk! In the same video, you see them careen onto the sidewalk, drive over a crosswalk, and, in the dubiously-chosen words of the GoCar's passenger "almost hit those Chinese."
The best part is that these people did this dumbass stuff, then posted it to YouTube! But just who are these goofballs, Stanley? Where's the original YouTube video?
"I can't reveal my source," Roberts tells SFist, pleasantly declining our requests for a link to the original video. Sounds like a search is in order! Who's got some free time?
Update: Bless you, SFist commenter shamptonian, for doing what I could not. Here's the full video, posted by one "Zacch Boyes" who in Jan 2013 says that "My wonderful girlfriend and I rented a [sic] Gocar in San Fran and drove over the Bay Bridge." Sigh.
And here's the one where they drive all over the sidewalk, per bob tobb. Good work, guys.