John Roughan: Time to give way to intuition

It has been said that the give-way rule that has been followed in New Zealand goes against intuition. Photo / APN

Tomorrow life in New Zealand becomes a little less courteous. At least that is how it will seem to me when I'm in a car, whether turning left or right.

They say the unusual give-way rule we have observed for 35 years now has to go because it is "counter-intuitive". Of course it is. Courtesy is counter-intuitive. No child naturally lets another go ahead if he can easily get through the door first.

Manners are learned, and can become so intuitive you never give them a thought. When Steven Joyce, as Transport Minister two years ago, announced we would do away with the rule favouring right-turning traffic, nobody spoke up for the rule.

Those who disliked the decision said we might have been mad to adopt the rule in 1977 but we were used to it now so why change back and risk needless confusion? They appeared to be out-voted by those who declared that after all these years they still find the present rule confusing. Really?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm living in the same country. True, there are moments when you were about to turn right and there is a line of oncoming traffic behind a car turning left. You wait, and the left-turner waits, to see whether a car behind is coming through and the left-turner can go. Does that count as confusing? Maybe, momentarily.

I was living overseas in 1977 and the rule had been three years in force by the time I got back. I found it bizarre but not difficult. I rather admired what I thought was the Kiwi ingenuity that had worked out we would all be better off if right turners went first, and I liked to think it accorded with a considerate national character.

Now, in the wake of Mr Joyce's decision, I read that our 1977 traffic engineers had copied the Australian state of Victoria and I have an awful suspicion they changed their mind because Victoria did, in 1993.

The Land Transport Safety Authority twice tried to talk previous New Zealand governments into reverting too. Helen Clark's cabinet rebuffed its case in 2004. The authority tried again as soon as National arrived in 2008.

Within a month of the election, Mr Joyce announced the change was under consideration. The authority had assembled some crash statistics to support a change. It had the police, the Institute of Professional Engineers and the Automobile Association on its side too.

It was the AA, I think, that used to distribute a sticker that was once common on car windscreens. It said, "Courtesy is Contagious".

My father had one on his cars for years though he is the last person I know who would need the reminder. Courtesy is contagious. You sense it daily on the roads. The driver who lets you into a line of traffic leaves you exalted by the wealth of human kindness and ready to let the next vehicle in.

It might be no more than my impression that drivers these days are more considerate than they were a generation ago. And it may be an improvement confined to Auckland. Visitors from Christchurch notice a difference. The bigger the city, perhaps, the more necessary courtesy becomes, and the more contagious it can be.

The roads are a wonderful place to watch the human mind at work. It is interesting in Auckland at the moment to observe drivers' responses to traffic lights on motorway on-ramps that were introduced a few years ago.

Quite a lot of people plainly resent being held back several hundred metres from the motorway for five seconds or so before the light lets them go. You see them inching across the stop-line, rolling forward as far as they dare, craning their necks back to keep the signal in sight.

On the green, they take off with a vengeance. You can almost hear them cursing the traffic engineers who have held them up for no reason they can see.

The reason is counter-intuitive. Staggered entry helps keep the motorway flowing. Admittedly, the motorway traffic is still crawling more often than not, but I dare say it would be worse without the signals.

Oddly enough, many of the drivers that cannot see the virtue for ramp signals also haven't worked out that to "merge like a zip" it's a good idea to drive as far on the ramp as they can before joining the line. You see them pull up half-way along and try to edge in, holding up cars behind them, breaking the "zip", slowing everything down.

Intuition no doubt has a value but it can be thoughtless. Tomorrow we have to give way to it.