Transportation
Proof that California's Drivers Can't Handle the Rain
Crunching the numbers on L.A.'s wet-weather car wrecks.
The inability of California drivers to handle the rain is legendary: From San Francisco to L.A., there's no better way to majorly screw up a commute than by throwing in some drizzle.
What has long been a regional stereotype now has numerical support from Noah Deneau, an electrical engineer and visualization enthusiast in Austin. Deneau has taken 11 years of NOAA weather reports and accident data from California's Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System and crafted a simple, yet enlightening look at L.A.'s rain-derived auto carnage. The red bars here indicate the mean crash rate per hour when conditions are dry; blue bars represent rates when things are wet: