Find the gap
The current vehicle safety campaign encouraging people to "be patient" and "waitfora gap" at intersections is barking up the wrong off-ramp.
Trouble is, New Zealanders still drive as if they live in a small town. They speed, they jump red lights, they close up gaps. If drivers were to wait for a gap in traffic in Auckland, for example, they'd run out of petrol.
What needs to be encouraged is for drivers to create gaps - to travel a safer distance from the car in front, to stop when the traffic is crawling along for cars to come in from side streets, to slow when a light is turning orange.
For that to happen, though, drivers need to pay more attention to lights and mirrors and speedometers. Yeah, right.
Trouble is, New Zealanders still drive as if they live in a small town. They speed, they jump red lights, they close up gaps. If drivers were to wait for a gap in traffic in Auckland, for example, they'd run out of petrol.
What needs to be encouraged is for drivers to create gaps - to travel a safer distance from the car in front, to stop when the traffic is crawling along for cars to come in from side streets, to slow when a light is turning orange.
For that to happen, though, drivers need to pay more attention to lights and mirrors and speedometers. Yeah, right.
posted by Mark Broatch at 5:05 PM
20 Comments:
Hello, Mark, Stephen & Rob,
Your blog rocks.
Do people really slow down when a light goes orange?
Wow.
Love to all,
Kate B
i say it's a lack of driver education.
(waits for jeers and fruit to stop flying.)
how else can i explain even the lack of uphill-has-right-of-way courtesy these days?
god i feel so old.
"Trouble is, New Zealanders still drive as if they live in a small town."
They do live in a small town. Auckland is a minnow. You should thank Buddha or whoever you don't live in Bangkok or Seoul or Rome. That's Rome, Italy.
Yeah, well, I live in London and they all drive like they live in a small town here, too - or they really don't realise the down-side of playing chicken with a double-decker bus.
Anyway, cars are buggering up the environment. Bring back the horse.
"They do live in a small town. Auckland is a minnow."
Yes, yes it is. But it's busier than bigger cities cos it has no public transport. Unlike Rome, Italy, which has one of those underground things. We could build one, have horses draw the trains.
Yeah, I like that - horses could push the trains kind of like the way that army guys have to push our Hercules planes at the moment when they refuse to start, don't want to go to war, etc (an excellent contribution to cleaner air by our airfleet if you ask me).
Do horses have like a methane issue? You couldn't have cows pushing the trains, because they do have a methane issue and I'm pretty sure the exercise would make them even worse. That would be the end of godzone's ozone right there.
Then they would need men behind them with shovels. Great. Back to the good old days, and double-zero unemployment.
no, no, no. not in this magic day and age. If they can clone sheep and bring the tasmanian tiger back to life, etc, surely they can make an arseless horse.
it's all nearly sorted.
Oh get a room, you two.
Then what?
I've seen the films. You need a third, and often a fourth.
I think I've seen one of those - it involved a TV repairman, no TV, and a couple of sisters?
"how else can i explain even the lack of uphill-has-right-of-way courtesy these days"
Please explain DF
k8 said...
> Hello, Mark, Stephen & Rob,
>
> Your blog rocks.
Honestly, I don't know why I bother.
I see some people have mentioned Auckland...my first resposne on reaidng this is that, no no, AUCKLANDERS drive as if they are in a small town.
I say this as someone who (a) grew up in a small town and (b) lived in Auckland for 10 years but (c) now lives in Wellington.
I also do a lot of driving around the NI. I usually leave a fair gap between myself and the car in front of me.
The only place this is regularly filled by passing cars is from the Waikato north.
The point about 'uphill has right of way' - its a courtesy from the old horse and buggy days which is still observed in some areas. Quite a bit in Wellington, where the roads are steep and most of them have large bits where there is only room for one vehicle.
Wellingtonians are fairly courteous drivers, by and large. The alternative is total mayhem, given the poor roads.
Yeah, see - horse and buggy. I'm right. That's where we need to go - you get environment and etiquette at the same time.
Is that how you spell etiquette? It's not a word that applies to my life a lot of the time. Plus, I went to a state school.
Chris, why do you bother?
Rob, that's what I thought the uphill thing meant, but I haven't seen it in practice. The Waikato north thing is probably right, as that's when the maniacal competitiveness kicks in.
K8, yeah one of those zoney state schools, I bet. Jane Austen would have approved.
Look if everybody cut two blades off the propellor thingie under the bonnet, the traffic would go a lot slower.
The rest is a horses arse...
What propeller thingy? There's a propeller thingy? Why don't we all fly jetsons style then?
I'd like to have that job where you just push the red button, was it, and go for tea.
As an Aucklander who lived in a tiny rtural town for three years and just moved back, I have to agree with Rob, it's Aucklanders who drive like that, not drivers in small towns.
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