Level four.

Not three. Three fills from the west side and stays full because people who take three are people who are staying, and level five is a longer walk for the same distance in the air, which nobody believes until they have done it in February.

Four clears fastest. It has cleared fastest for eleven years and I have never seen anyone write it down.

I want to talk about the spiral, because the spiral is the whole design and nobody discusses it.

You come up the ramp and the radius tightens about two thirds of the way through each turn. It is not a mistake. It is what happens when you fit a helix into a footprint somebody else drew. What it means for you, in the car, is that you brake in the same place every time — not because you are cautious but because the geometry brakes you, and after enough years your foot does it before you do.

I could drive it with my eyes shut. I will not, because that is not a thing to say in a newspaper, but I could.

Eleven years.

I have never been inside.

I want to be clear that this is not a position. I am not making a point. There has simply never been an occasion. I come, I park, I walk out the pedestrian exit on the north side, I do my business elsewhere, and I come back, and the car is where I left it, and I go home. That is the transaction. That has always been the transaction.

Lately the levels do not fill.

I noticed it the way you notice these things, which is that four stopped being an achievement. I used to take four because I had worked out that four was correct. Now four is simply available, and so is three, and so is the west side of three, which used to be a thing you told people about.

I do not know what that means for anyone in there. I have never met them.

Here is what I know and it is not much. I came every time. For eleven years I did exactly the thing the structure was built to have me do — I drove in, I stopped, I put the car in a numbered rectangle, and I left it there for four hours. Every element of that is what was wanted. If you had drawn the plan and put a figure next to it, I am the figure.

And it was not enough. Whatever the arithmetic was, I was in it, and I was in it every week, and the arithmetic did not work.

So I have been thinking about what exactly got counted, and I think what got counted was the car.

The car arrived. The car is extremely reliable about arriving. Nobody ever needed the driver to want anything once he was up the ramp, and nobody built anything that depended on him wanting something, and so he did not, and the ramp performed beautifully the entire time.

That is the most I have got. I am not an analyst. I am telling you that the ramp is a good ramp.

Next month I want to do the merge at the top of the hill, which is genuinely dangerous and which I have complained about to three separate offices.

Stop Short appears monthly. The author is a Maxima with tinted windows and does not take questions about the tint.