From designer Athanasia Leivaditou, via Gothamist, comes word of this new “Umbrella Coat Raincoat,” proposed as a solution to this city’s unfortunate rainy-day sidewalk umbrella traffic problem:

First of all, call it whatever you want, that’s just a hood. I mean, it’s a glorified hood for sure, but something attached to the back of a jacket that you pull over your head to protect your hair from the rain is a hood. I guess this one is special because it’s, I don’t know, bigger than a regular hood.

It really goes to underscore my main issue with rainy days in the city, which is: Why don’t more people just get rain jackets? Those dinky five-dollar umbrellas you get from the guy in the poncho on the corner aren’t going to keep your pants dry anyway, so you might as well save everyone the trouble of dodging your pointy umbrella-end thingies, invest in a $40 rain jacket, buckle down and face the storm. Plus when you’re not towing your own umbrella you’re more apt to dodge the umbrellas of others.

But the main thing is that the jackasses who carry the huge golf umbrellas will never go for the Umbrella Coat Raincoat, so this won’t solve anything. If they had even a shred of human decency within them they’d realize how obnoxious it is to command the entire width of the sidewalk with their stupid umbrella and find a more reasonable one. It’s silly to expect them to just hand over the massive pinwheels they landed at the Barclays in favor of some designer raincoat that’s going to make the world better for the rest of us. They don’t care about the rest of us; that’s the thing.

The only solution is one I’ve proposed before: License to carry laws for umbrellas in Manhattan. A written test and a practical test.