It rained this week. Not a biblical deluge — just regular rain, the kind that falls from clouds and hits the ground, as rain tends to do. And yet, judging by the chaos on San Francisco streets, you'd think every driver in the city had never encountered precipitation before.

Let's talk about what happens when water meets asphalt in a city that goes months without meaningful rainfall. Oils lift off the road surface, creating a slick film that turns every intersection into a physics experiment. Your tires have less grip. Your stopping distance increases. This is not advanced automotive theory — it's basic cause and effect. And yet, the average SF driver responds to these conditions by doing exactly what they do in dry weather: tailgating at 50 mph, blowing through stop signs, and treating turn signals like optional decorative features.

The turn signal thing deserves its own paragraph, honestly. A turn signal is not a courtesy. It is a communication device that tells every other driver, cyclist, and pedestrian around you what you're about to do. Not using one forces everyone in your vicinity to play a high-stakes guessing game with two-ton machines. It costs you zero dollars and approximately one calorie of finger movement. Use it.

Then there are the classics: blocking crosswalks, parking across driveways, stopping six cars back from an intersection so nobody behind you can access the turn lane. These aren't accidents. These are choices made by people who either don't know the rules or don't care about them. Neither is acceptable when you're piloting heavy machinery through a dense urban environment.

As one local put it with perfect resignation: "They're not going to be reading this, and if for some reason they do, they will think it's about someone else and not them." That's probably true. But someone has to say it.

Driving is a privilege, not a right. It comes with responsibilities — to yourself, to other drivers, to the cyclists and pedestrians who are even more vulnerable than you are. San Francisco already has enough infrastructure problems without its residents actively trying to create new ones every time the sky opens up.

So here's the ask, and it's embarrassingly simple: signal your turns, maintain safe following distances, slow down in the rain, and generally operate your vehicle like someone who understands that other human beings exist. The bar is underground, and we're still tripping over it.