Dialogue: Return of traffic cops enough to induce road rage

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Of all the dull, witless things this Government is doing, the restoration of a dedicated traffic patrol is the most trivial. And therefore the most infuriating.

It will be warmly welcomed by the grey cardigan brigade who drive by the rules, blithely unconcerned that they are breaking the traffic flow and causing a flurry of lane-changing in their wake.

They have never come to terms with the disappearance of traffic officers and write the most tedious, anal-retentive letters that newspapers receive.

There is a regulatory need still beating deep in the New Zealand psyche. Few other countries feel the urge to put a special police force on the roads, probably for the very good reason that the job can only attract the sort of people who wear security passes with pride and never really let their dog off the leash.

In Britain they become rugby referees. In this country, since traffic control was entrusted to the real police, they have gravitated to the driver licensing business. With similar results.

Now some of them can return to the roads, all for the sake of "perception" evidently. The police, who are happy enough to hand back the job, say there has been a "perception" that traffic control is not what it was. Policy that panders to perception is by definition built on error.

I'm surprised at Labour and the Alliance. This is New Zealand First territory. The art of effective policing does not lie in the strict enforcement of essentially petty rules.

Good policing, as the much misrepresented "broken windows" policy in New York proved, means going with the flow, knowing what needs to be stopped and what can be let go.

It means keeping a sense of proportion and never forgetting the ultimate purpose is not law enforcement for its own sake. The rules of sport are designed to produce a spectacle. The laws of a community are intended to maintain its peace and harmony.

That is not the Germanic attitude to law. The Anglo-Saxon strain in the national temperament bridles at the very idea that rules can be relaxed when it suits. Celtic common sense is in short supply.

One of the convictions of the grey-cardigan creed is that driving habits have deteriorated and peace and harmony have given way to "road rage" since the demise of the traffic cops.

For the life of me, I can't see it. Driving standards here were never high. That has more to do with population than policing. Notice it is even worse in smaller towns?

As for road rage, I'm almost afraid to confess, I have never seen it. Never. It is an urban myth, isn't it? The police say so, the real police.

When the traffic officers get back in their patrol cars we will hear more of it.

By their own accounts they have begun to incur a bit of rage among those who fail licence tests. That I can understand. Not excuse necessarily, but understand.

Driver licence testing has become the last refuge of the regulatory itch in this country.

Young people - males especially - are failed repeatedly for omissions a reasonable person would keep in perspective.

They can be failed for behaviour that is standard on the roads. Like signalling to leave a roundabout which drivers rarely do, and no doubt should. But it is not as though licensing is going to change behaviour.

There is a good business in driving tuition today that consists largely of training people to pass the test, not to drive normally. It imparts little tricks like tilting the rear-vision mirror so that you have to move your head to use it. Thus the tester will notice and not fail you for failing to check the rear every 10 seconds.

Young drivers are being knocked back three and four times, at $42 a throw. It has been this way for 10 or 15 years now.

When it is reported that there are an estimated 200,000 unlicensed drivers on the road these days, I believe it. That is the sort of thing that happens when policing is perverse.

The police watched the traffic perfectly well. They didn't feel the need to stop people when a signal would suffice. They found ways - speed cameras and the like - to police the roads efficiently rather than officiously.

Tellingly, it was only when the transport bureaucrats commissioned them to conduct an arbitrary number of breath tests that traffic has been senselessly impeded at the most unlikely times.

Now we are to watch for patrol cars again and meet those poor officers who are no doubt nice people at home. It is not their fault really. When you are assigned only to road duty you make the most of it.

The job should be left with those who can keep a sense of proportion because they have much more important things to do.