William btw First and Ashley

Yes, I was on the 12A trying to get up the hill and helped it back down safely, while warning off drivers with little sense, not to crowd the bus. One attempted the hill by passing the bus (as it was attempting to power up the hill) only to founder and cause the bus to stop short. Another driver, coming east on William, decided to go the wrong way down first st. which also wasn’t exactly a smart move. Doesn’t anyone think when driving anymore? Especially during adverse weather? Both buses finally made it up the hill. No thanks to courtesy by any other driver around. As a former truck driver in the Army, I always advocate using a ground guide when backing up a large vehicle with limited sight behind it. Otherwise you are at the mercy of other drivers, who apparently have no consideration of their or anyone else’s safety. Was a crazy 5 minutes. Bummer was, I missed my connecting bus. :^)

Re: [1] “As a former truck driver in the Army, …”

When we moved to Ann Arbor from Rochester, New York, we pulled our old Chevette on a trailer behind the U-Haul. Our strategy for keeping straight while backing up was: Don’t ever back up, keep moving forward. This strategy was thwarted when the driveway around the hotel where we stopped in the middle of the night was blocked. After a day of loading a truck, driving a couple hundred miles, even using one of us as a ground guide, we were not blessed by luck or the intuition to discover the basic rule of thumb for backing trailered rigs, a piece of knowledge which they apparently dispense freely in truck driving school in the U.S. Army: Turn the wheel towards the mirror with the trailer in it. This rule was conveyed to us by a guy who noticed our difficulty and offered it as advice. I was not eager to see if I could apply it successfully myself. So the guy volunteered to back the trailer the roughy 100 yards required, which he accomplished in less than a minute. I ventured that he appeared to have done this kind of thing before, which he confirmed he had, as a truck driver in the U.S. Army — that’s where he’d learned that simple rule. Thanks, Bear, for setting a good example of another simple rule, that probably can’t really be taught, but that makes the world go round smoother: Help people out when you know how to help, even if it means you miss your bus.

So it was Bear himself that I saw on that icy William Street hill, making sure that those crazy auto drivers did not continue to crowd the bus that was trying to gain a little traction and momentum. (I thought perhaps that it was an alternate AATA bus driver.) Those bus riders were lucky you were aboard. Thanks for both your thoughtfulness and your prompt action, Bear!

I often drive a lawn tractor with a little trailer on it, and after hundreds of attempts at backing it up, I finally settled on this strategy: unhook the trailer from the tractor and walk it where I need it to be, then drive the tractor there. But I’ll try yours now, Dave! Thanks for the tip.