Sitting in Cars

May 7, 2004 - People Sitting in Cars at the Beach

The Chevy Suburban, the Shaquille O’Neal of cars, has 131.6 cubic feet of interior space. By comparison, the new VW Slug Bugs have 96.3 cubic feet, and your little 8x6 bathroom with an 8-foot high ceiling has 384 cubic feet (that’s length times width times height for all you 4th grade Math Super-bowlers). So, being that the biggest car is 1/3 the size of the smallest room in one’s house, it would seem rather odd that on a nice sunny, not-too-hot, not-too-cold day like yesterday a person would confine himself inside his or her car if they didn’t really have to. You wouldn’t hang out in the bathroom all day, would you?

But, just like they say in that old Chevron commercial, “People Do”. And, it was Ed’s idea to see just how many people were doing, and to see if car-sitters could be counted according to what they are driving and/or what they are doing.

So, yesterday the dedicated staff of edhat.com got into our 97.7 cubic feet of car interior and drove from our De La Vina & Mission office to the Shoreline Park parking lots. We pulled into one of the many available spots, grabbed our clickers and clipboards, and GOT OUT OF OUR CAR into the seemingly infinite cubic foot place called the outdoors. Once there, we proceeded to walk up and down the lot, passing cars-with-people and cars-without-people. The people in the cars-with-people were reading, staring, eating, drinking, drawing, resting, talking on their cell phones, and sleeping. And, what about the people in the cars-without-people? Well, they weren’t in their cars. Duh.

But, aside from doing whatever it is they were doing, the people in the cars were very curious about us. “What are these outside world people doing with clickers and clipboards?” they thought. But, we thought right back at them. “Why don’t these people get out of their cars and sit on a nice bench?”

There was no strong pattern with regard to the types of cars in which people-in-cars sat. We saw a couple of Dodge Vans which very well could have been Santa Barbara mobile residences, but we also saw plenty of BMW’s, Mercedes, and Lexus’s (Lexi?).

The results of our survey were that 29.4% of all ocean-facing cars parked in the two Shoreline Park lots had people sitting in them. And note, these were all Single Occupancy Parked Vehicles (SOPV’s). Ford was the most common type of car we found. Dodge and Toyota were a close second. Also noteworthy was the fact that the West parking lot (the one closer to Lazy Acres) had significantly more people-in-cars than the East Lot.

The winner of the contest was Necrophonica, a name that the dedicated staff believes relates to talking to dead people. We’re not dead (we’re ed), but if Necrophonica talks to us, we can hook him/her up with a cool edhat t-shirt or movie tickets.

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