Matt Griffin
Sports Editor
With the recent rainfall Southern California has had, it seems that the true colors of our driving skills are exposed.
When the rain comes, it appears as though the world is ending with all the accidents that occur here.
Driving in the rain would not be that big of a deal if drivers would just slow down or at least drive the speed limit.
I am not the best driver on the road but I do know what my truck is capable of.
It cracks me up to see a little Honda Civic trying to cross a road that is flooded.
Rainy weather in Southern California is not that bad.
We freak out if we get even a little hail.
Now yes, we do have many of the largest freeways.
And yes, the roads are always more dangerous after the first rain, but that is no excuse for someone to plow into another person’s car.
If every driver took one extra second and minimized his or her driving speed by a minimum of five miles per hour, maybe freeway congestion would not be that bad.
I am a lucky commuter who gets to deal with the congestion of the 10 Freeway and Kellogg Hill every day.
When the rain comes, people seem to forget that their car will not stop on a dime if they need it to.
On my way to school, which consists of a nine-mile drive, I saw six accidents.
One vehicle took a curvy onramp too fast and spun out, crashing into a telephone pole.
The second and third vehicles were both rear-end fender benders.
The fourth car actually flipped while going uphill.
The final fifth and sixth vehicles were again both fender benders.
These accidents are all preventable.
The common instinct of every driver is to look at the accident as they drive by.
This is what causes the fender benders, transforming that one accident into four.
Why do we care?
Because we need to see what happened.
Over spring break I drove east for a snowboarding trip.
While it was sunny and nice down here, the weather was a little different back east.
During the drive I noticed that many cars would pull to the side of the roads and that there was more congestion on the offramp to different rest stops then there was actually on the highways themselves.
It seems that drivers in other states are not in a hurry to get where they were going.
Another option they may have is that they let themselves have enough time to accommodate for the bad weather and possible gridlock.
Wow, what a concept.
Once again, I am not a great driver who always abides by the rules of the road, but if the majority of us did follow the rules of the road and slowed down a bit during rainy weather, things might change for the better.
With the sunny spring weather that we are about to encounter, doesn’t mean we can all drive as fast as we want.
Instead, why not drive as if we were in bad weather all the time?
Hopefully California drivers will heed this advice and we can all feel safer.
Matt Griffin, a junior journalism major, is sports editor for the Campus Times. He can be reached by e-mail at mgriffin@ulv.edu.
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