Your avatar suddenly makes some sense!

In light of the recent tangent, I just want it on record that I am neither married nor a licensed driver. If I were (hypothetically) married and a licensed driver, then my (hypothetical) wife would likely (and rightfully) insist on driving instead of me. Why? For fear of (hypothetically) dieing in a horrible (yet hypothetical) car crash due to my (not-so-hypothetical) incompetence behind the wheel.

My fiancee makes me drive everywhere. Not because I'm a particularly good driver or she's a particularly bad one, just she doesn't like to drive so I default to doing it.

I make her do any driving in cities if we have any call to go to one though. I hate cities. But we almost never do.

I WISH my wife hated my driving enough to get behind the wheel herself, especially since I drive to and from work 35 miles each way 5 days a week... in early rush hour...

I prefer driving. It's not that my wife is a bad driver. It's that she's a good California driver, which is a completely different thing than being a good Chicago driver. She gets thrown by things I've lived with my whole life*, and does things that I rarely associate with Chicago traffic. She's also got much faster reaction times, and is more prone to heavy braking (meaning she'll start braking later than I would during an approach to, say, a red stoplight). So when I'm riding with her, it's everything I can do to NOT issue the Gasp of Death and then ram my feet through the floorboard.

That, and the passenger seat feels funny to my ass.

*: Prime example being passing on the right, in what is technically the parking lane. You learn to do this, and do it well and quickly, growing up in Chicago, because many of the roads are simply too narrow, and if you don't, you'll never get past that guy who goes slow enough to catch every red light. In her native driving turf, even the minor streets are so wide that passing on the left is trivial, so passing on the right is generally a grade-A dick move.

Not a California trait. Most of the US does not pass on the right. California drivers are less upset about right passing than much of the midwest. Also, I am a good driver,BV.

Passing on the right is fine, so long as you're in a travel lane. That wasn't what I was getting from freemage. What I was getting was the image of him pulling the dick move of passing in the breakdown lane, or on the shoulder, or on some part of the road that is not meant for through travel. And that IS a dick move, it's a dumbass move, and frankly if people do it in Chicago that's a reason to never go there.

dis.

I don't think he meant the breakdown lane. I think meant the rightmost lane, where people downtown park.

This. I'm not talking about expressway driving, here--I'm talking surface-streets, where you've got two lanes (one in each direction) plus an additional parking lane on one or both sides. It is true that this parking lane is not meant for through travel. However, in Chicago, there are times when it is necessary to use it to briefly pass the person who is insisting on trying to turn left at an uncontrolled side-street intersection during the middle of rush hour. It is also quite common, when stuck behind someone who is traveling below the posted speed limit for no apparent reason other than a concern that their vehicle is incapable of managing 30 mph, to use it to bypass them, typically at a stoplight. (The maneuver goes like this--slow driver stops at intersection. Faster driver pulls up and around them, on the right. Normally, this would only be done if you were planning on turning right, but the intersection does not actually have a right-turn lane marked out, either. When the light changes, then, the faster driver accelerates solidly--normally, unless the slower driver suddenly decides he needs to be in front, the passing is done smoothly and with little or no fuss.)

This isn't to say that all pass-on-the-right is considered kosher in Chicago--there are definitely places where it's just as dickish as anyplace else. However, it's an adaptation to a situation where passing in any other way is impossible, yet both reasonable and desirable.