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Visual Proof There Are More Car Crashes In L.A. When It Rains
In case you didn't get the memo yesterday, it was raining HARD (for L.A. standards) yesterday, and drivers were all aflutter. Traffic was hellish on the early morning commute, and we can definitely blame the rain for that one.
Since we hadn't had rainfall in such a long time, the National Weather Service sent out a warning about driving on the slick roadways that had oil build up on on them. Even a McDonald's big rig overturned on the 210 Freeway in Pasadena early Tuesday morning, with some melted dairy seen oozing out of the truck.
Two screenshots of Google Maps traffic above show crashes throughout the Southland. One was taken on Tuesday around 8:40 a.m., and the other this morning at the same, revealing a considerable higher number of crashes while it rained. Yesterday's map was a flurry of red crash icons and yellow exclamation marks, which we're sure just made commuters want to pound their heads on their steering wheels when they saw that.
The California Highway Patrol told the L.A. Times that on Tuesday from 4 a.m. to noon, there were 527 reported crashes on SoCal freeways. Last week at the same time when the weather was ridiculously hot and sunny, there were only 267 crashes.
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There are two schools of thought when it comes to the increased number of L.A. car crashes in the rain. One is that people just don't know how to drive in L.A. when it rains, and that our wimpy driving contributes to the crashes and snail's pace traffic. And then the other is that we're not really all that bad at driving, and that those roads are extra slippery with oil. Whatever the reason, we have to admit that when it rains in L.A., we all contemplate about not even getting in our cars and going to work:
me this a.m.: couldn't find rain jacket/umbrella, no clue what shoes to wear, briefly contemplated working from home #LAproblems #LATweather
— Annie Z. Yu (@anniezyu) September 15, 2015
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