drivers

I was reading an article this morning that says that when riding in cars, women are passengers 29% of the time, while men are only passengers 14% of the time. (I believe these numbers apply to the US only.)

Disregarding the fact that this means an abysmally low amount of carpooling, I was a bit surprised that women are driven around twice as much as men. Then again, I'm probably biased because with my parents, my mom is almost always the driver. My sister gets carsick easily, and my dad drives more aggressively, so when we were kids, my mom had to drive to prevent my sister from puking. (Not that my mom is a passive driver; I often get passed by her when we're caravan-ing, and I'm usually going 80.) These days, my mom drives because my dad's vision is terrible; he's always asking us to read street signs for him.

I myself drive probably half of the time (maybe less than half of the distance). D hates city driving and only recently mastered parallel parking, so any time we're headed for San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, or even Marin sometimes (passing through SF on 19th Avenue can be a bitch), I automatically drive. I'm also responsible for driving in bad weather (Tahoe, rain, fog), and to 49er games, as Candlestick parking is no joke. D makes up for it by taking on most of the South Bay: Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose, Milpitas, Fremont, etc.

On the other hand, my sister seems to dislike driving, and while she and her husband were staying at my parents' house last year, I noticed that he would do most of the driving. Last week, I realized that neither of them like driving much...a few times when we were leaving dinner, I saw her pass the keys (to my parents' car) to her husband, who promptly passed them back to his younger brother, who drove them all home.