Drizzle Can’t Rein In Drivers

As a late-winter storm blasted much of the upper Midwest and East with every incarnation of cold water--sleet, ice and heaps of snow--Southern California braved a Tuesday of, gasp, drizzles.

As any experienced Angeleno can tell you, slight drizzles and plenty of variable cloudiness is an almost sure-fire equation for a freeway fiasco.

Call Los Angeles drivers spoiled, aggressive or just weather virgins. Whatever you label them, they don’t seem to cope well with a tiny dose of actual meteorology.

Jeff Baugh, a traffic reporter for KFWB-AM (980), has observed the drizzle effect many times from his news chopper.

It often leads the Brooklyn native to ponder (to himself, not on the airwaves) the unthinkable: “Gee, it’s raining. Can you imagine if it ever snowed here or we got ice?”

Never mind the possibilities of real weather. With just Tuesday’s light showers, the California Highway Patrol reported 179 accidents in Los Angeles during the commuting hours of 5 to 9 a.m. Compared with the same period a week earlier, albeit a dry Tuesday, the CHP said it was a 160% increase in accidents.

But there were no fatalities the entire day.

The main problem is motorists don’t give themselves extra minutes to get to work, said Sgt. Ernie Sanchez, spokesman for the CHP’s Southern Division, which covers Los Angeles.

Drivers zoom along at the same speed, drizzles be damned. They forget the American Automobile Assn. mantra: A car needs two to three times the stopping distance on wet pavement compared to dry.

Ignore this and the karmic consequence may be crunched metal.

For folks who want to blame the mishaps on the slick residue secreted by millions of passing cars, Sanchez said look for another alibi.

“We’re almost three quarters into the [rainy] season,” he said. “That’s not really a factor for incidents we had today.”

Uh-oh. Does that mean the dreaded Southern California factor?

“You see the bumper stickers ‘Californians can’t drive in the rain,’ ” Sanchez said. “I don’t know if it’s a correct statement, but it’s definitely a factor.”

Jeff Spring, spokesman for the AAA of Southern California, puts some credence in it too.

“We don’t get enough rain for Southern Californians to remember how to drive in rain,” he said. “It takes a downpour for them to slow down.”

Whether it’s storms of biblical proportions or misty sprinkles, Spring said the AAA urges drivers to slow down and to keep a safe distance between their car and the next vehicle.

Even with a little wet stuff, Spring said Southern Californians probably drive on average a little faster than other parts of the country. “There are a lot of cars with people rushed to get somewhere,” he said.

Sandra Ball-Rokeach, a University of Southern California communications professor who heads a media and injury-prevention program that addresses aggressive driving, thinks the rain brings out latent Type-A tendencies lurking in our not-so-laid-back L.A. psyches.

“You have show biz culture and aggressive driving,” she said. “It’s a bad combination, from an injury-prevention point of view.”

Ball-Rokeach endured a bit of her own rain-induced hell Tuesday morning when a car exiting the Santa Monica Freeway didn’t bother to notice a truck in the next lane.

That oversight caused the truck to swerve into her lane, forcing Ball-Rokeach into the emergency lane.

“Under the best conditions, it is insane,” Ball-Rokeach said of Southern California driving. “And when it rains it becomes bizarre.”

In fact, Los Angeles driving habits seem downright oddball when compared to the gritty roadway conditions faced by many motorists in colder parts.

When told that his California sister agency issues press releases at the beginning of the wet season on how to drive in the rain, Michigan AAA spokesman Jim Rink chuckled.

“Well if they’re having trouble with a little drizzle in L.A. they really wouldn’t like what we have,” he said from his Dearborn, Mich. office. “Three to six inches of steady, slippery slushy snow. And some blowing drifting snow, with winds.”

When conditions get really bad, driving gets downright pioneer-like.

“Sometimes the best you can do is keep your car in the ruts left by the car before you,” Rink said. “Kind of like the wagons on the Oregon Trail but with snow.”