by Garrison Frost

I've never seen any statistics that prove that drivers from Los Angeles are particularly bad at driving in the rain, but that doesn't mean I don't have to listen to hundreds of people each winter tell me that. I don't hear it from the locals, but I get it by the bucket from the out-of-town relative, the woman from the New York office, the Cubs fan dragged here by his girlfriend, the Seattle-native whose software company moved everyone to Santa Monica – everyone with some sort of unresolved affection for the crappy place they were forced to leave.

No, these people aren't restrained by the limitations of data. You never hear them start a sentence by saying, "The Texas Transportation Institute in a 2003 survey of CHP accident data ...." No, you just hear, "God, those moonbat L.A. drivers just lose their lunch at the first drop." As we know, when something is repeated often enough, it becomes a universal assumption. And so, L.A. drivers have a reputation for becoming idiots at the first cloudburst of fall, and pretty much staying that way until the end of spring.

But this is one generalization to which I take personal exception, and not just because it is unsupported by data. In fact, I would argue that people in L.A. are particularly good at driving in the rain, and I have to only look to common sense for support.

Sure, people who live in cities that get more rain might be more used to driving in it, but no one flat-out drives more than people from Los Angeles, and that's got to count for something. Don't tell me that the woman who commutes three hours each day from the Valley to downtown hasn't learned a thing or two along the way. We're in our cars constantly, and when we're on the road, we're surrounded by other cars.

Really, rain is the least of our worries. We've got fire, earthquakes, mudslides and small arms fire all handled. The Long Beach Freeway 710 on a sunny day is trickier than any downpour, and we deal with it.

Sure, that guy in Cleveland might encounter more rainy days, but you can't say his 20-minute commute from the suburbs to his office on fairly empty highways is a big tax on his skills. Try a two-hour commute with a big rig on one side, a gardening truck on the other and a Hummer on your bumper. Then try it – as Angelenos do every day – driving with your knee while sending email on the PDA in your left hand and balancing a triple mocha-something-or-other in your right hand.

Another problem with generalizing about people who live in Los Angeles is that a lot of these generalizations don't quite fit together. For instance, if you buy the notion that hardly anyone who lives in Los Angeles is actually from Los Angeles, that millions have moved here for the weather, then shouldn't we assume that all these newcomers have brought with them some foul-weather driving experience? I mean, if we're all from Buffalo and Atlanta and Madison, it would be crazy to think that we left our driving skills at the border.

And if we were to actually buy this ridiculous idea that good weather is some kind of indicator of poor rain driving ability, who is to say that L.A. drivers are significantly worse than those in San Diego, Phoenix or any other place that doesn't get a lot of rain? Really, why let them off the hook? Heck, what about Santa Barbara? As long as facts aren't being brought into this, I'll bet State Street turns into bumper cars when it so much as gets overcast.

This said, those who criticize L.A. drivers omit the plain fact that driving in the rain is hard. Two inches in two hours is enough to turn anyone into jelly behind the wheel. And yet, every time the sky opens up over the Southland, millions of us manage to drive through it without getting injured or killed. Don't count our accidents. Count our non-accidents. What other city can say that 10 million drivers didn't crash in the rain. Enough said.

(March 31, 2006)

© Copyright 1999-2006 The Aesthetic