Chris and Susan's Big Adventure

Driver's Licenses

We finally got our New Zealand driver's licenses this week. We just had to take a written test. Now we no longer have to trot out our New Jersey licenses when somebody needs ID, and we see this as an important integration milestone. Oddly enough, Chris got his New Zealand private pilot's license before his driver's license, if only by a few days.

The most obvious difference for us, of course, is that kiwis drive on the left side of the road. After the first couple of terrifying days, it starts to feel natural and within a month we were pretty much fully adapted. American films now look odd to us since everyone's driving on the wrong side. The other thing that tourists tend to remark on is the roundabout, but this is also easy to adapt to. Being a pedestrian is more difficult and we still have to think things through before attempting to cross the street. The other problem is transferring the picture of driving on the left into 2D on paper and computer models. Of course this is only a problem if you're a transportation engineer.

It's only after living here for a while and buying a copy of the official "road code" that one starts to discover some very odd differences. The pictures below are all scanned from the road code. Obviously our readers from North America will have to swap "left turn" for "right turn" when comparing to their local traffic laws.



You can pass any time you like as long as you've decided that there's enough room to squeeze by, even if there's no passing lane. You just squeeze on through in the same lane. It pays to watch your mirrors if you're cruising along and want to swerve to miss one of the many potholes in the terrible roads.





I still can't get over this one. I've never actually seen it done, but kiwis seem to be terrified of the centre of the road and so the road code actually advocates turning right from the left side across both lanes of traffic instead of just one.

Note that in this and all other pictures the dotted arrow is for the driver without the right of way and the solid arrow for the driver with it.







This is the biggy. It is absolute lunacy and catches many a foreigner. New Zealand is the only country in the world to have this stupid rule and it still drives us nuts. Because of all the problems with it, nobody's really too sure who's going to yield at any given time.

So I want to turn right into a street (equivalent to a left turn in Canada) and the oncoming traffic is turning left. Everywhere else in the world the left turning traffic would have the right of way, but not here. At first blush this seems like a small point, but the problem is that the straight through traffic behind the left turning car has right of way over the right turning car. On a narrow road, the left turning car will block the straight through traffic and the right turning car (the red van in the picture) then can go and it's no big deal. The problem is where you have a regular road width or even a multi-lane road. In this case, the blue car is waiting for the red van who is waiting for the traffic behind the blue car. So now the blue car has to try to guess whether the van is going to wait for the traffic or not before making the decision to turn. Dangerous lunacy. There's a rumour that this rule may be changed at some point in the future - but of course changing it at this point would also cause mayhem.

Here's another cute one. All driveways are considered uncontrolled intersections and the give way rules apply. In this case, since there's no yield sign on the driveway, the red car at the supermarket has the right of way over the blue car on the road. Luckily, most people tend to ignore this rule.

Oh, and another good one that became important when the power went out in Auckland and all the lights went down: They don't have four way stops. As a result, all of the busy intersections with no lights became "uncontrolled intersections" and subject to the basic right of way rules. The problem? Everybody has to give way to the person on the right. Unlike a four way stop, it doesn't matter who got there first. Now everybody has somebody to the right, so nobody can go. The result is anarchy.



This one isn't dangerous, but it's a pet peeve of Chris'. The two signs to the left both mean the same thing, 100 km/hr. So why the heck do they have to invent a new sign that no foreigner can understand when they could just use a number?



















This is great. Note the top right tip.






The test wasn't too hard. These last two are sample questions from the exam.