Comments on: Road Rules #1 http://nz.kalafut.net/?p=36 A journal of learning to work and live in The Land of the Long White Cloud. Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:15:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.2 By: Jim http://nz.kalafut.net/?p=36&cpage=1#comment-18 Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:17:00 +0000 http://www.kalafut.net/wordpress/?p=36#comment-18 The weird ‘give way to the right’ rule has an even more illogical aspect: at a T intersection, a car turning right onto the top of the T has right of way over cars turning right off of the main road. The problems with this are many, but it seems like most NZ T intersections override this with a yield sign anyway.

A good example of the bad rule occurred just the other day. I was turning left but gave way to a guy turning right. He waited to give way to oncoming traffic behind me. The guy behind me decided there wasn’t enough room to swerve around and didn’t pass. So there the three of us were gridlocked for a second or two until I just went. Nonsense!

]]> By: Jeff the Bold http://nz.kalafut.net/?p=36&cpage=1#comment-17 Tue, 21 Mar 2006 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.kalafut.net/wordpress/?p=36#comment-17 There was one scenario that really caught my attention when driving on the left. Once, as I was driving on the left along a rural highway, a car approaching on a side street from the right gave a half-hearted stop, then turned left into the on-coming lane of traffic just as I was approaching the intersection. Here, when somebody approaches from the right and turns left into the oncoming lane, they have to cross my path. Of course, in NZ, that is not the case, but that didn’t stop me from almost flying out of my seat.

Far more annoying were my efforts to stop confusing the turn signal and the windshield wiper control. Driving a stick shift is interesting too, until you get used to pushing the gear shift lever away from your body to reach 2nd. I was grinding reverse quite a lot.

It’s the pedestrian travel that I have never been able to get accustomed to. Whenever I’m on foot in a country where they drive on the left, I’m always confused about where the cars will be coming from. Angela is probably totally screwed up by now, growing up in drive-on-the-left Malaysia, living in the drive-on-the-right US for many years, then moving to NZ.

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