7 posts tagged “traffic”

After today, I count eight red-light runners in Kilbirnie alone for this week. What gives? Has the law in New Zealand changed so that red lights are now advisory as they are in Beijing and New Delhi?
   Oh, in terms of race, of these eight I counted four Caucasians and one Polynesian; the others I didn’t notice because I was too busy braking or tooting my horn.
   I know there’s a proposal in Wellington for red light cameras. Are some stunt drivers being paid to drive SUVs and vans (as many of these runners are large vehicles) to make us accept that there’s a need for them?
   A word of warning to those who run red lights: if I have a green and I judge that the gap allows me to proceed safely, I’m going—and you should learn to stop on a red. One Mercedes ML driver last Wednesday learned that the hard way, but think of that as a test of your ABS.

I think we’ve all been behind cars at intersections where the first two cars, side by side, are at a red light. The drivers zone out. The light turns green. Both drivers do not realize. The cars behind start tooting.
   This is forgiveable, though I can say in 20-plus years of driving, I have never been the dozy driver. If I am first, I have a responsibility to see when the lights turn green.
   Today, I saw the opposite. Two cars, lined up at Taranaki Street, waiting to turn into Vivian Street. A red filter light is on. Car to the left, a Holden Astra (CZM 871) ignores the red light and drives very slowly, unsure of whether it applies. Duh. But they could have been out-of-towners unfamiliar with red lights or something. At a stretch I’ll overlook this one. They did the manœuvre as safely as they could.
   The sin is the car to the next lane, a BMW 318i. The number plate: THEDOM. Which suggested to me that it was a Fairfax Press car (man, those guys must still be rolling in it with BMW staff cars). It was sold by Shelly BMW, but the S and y had come off, so there was a nice ad for the dealer, Hell BMW. Seeing the other driver go, THEDOM’s driver decides that maybe they should go, too. On a red. Also very slowly.
   Are we such goddamn sheep behind the wheel that if one driver goes illegally, we are compelled to?
   Naturally, I stop and refuse to go on a red. The driver next to me, another Chinese, stopped as well. He didn’t look over but if he did, I can bet our reactions would have been similar: why do ‘Asian’ (as the media say) drivers get all the flak in this country for being bad drivers, when 99 times out of 100 it’s the other races, usually Caucasians, doing the crazy stuff like running red lights?
   I was surprised that at subsequent red lights, THEDOM actually stopped.
   I don’t think the BMW driver has much of an excuse, and if your number plate is THEDOM, you’re probably a Wellingtonian or your surname is Blundell.
   And therein lies a problem with personalized plates—they are too recognizable, and could give the companies they possibly represent a bad name. I wouldn’t have been the only person during a busy time in Wellington who would have seen this.
   Let me repeat to drivers out there: a red light means stop. And if another driver ignores it, it doesn’t give you permission to.

I get bored at traffic lights and if I have brought a cellphone, I might take a snapshot if there’s something interesting in view.

Not that you can really see in this first shot, but there is a National billboard in the distance. Even if I shot it up close, you wouldn’t know. They look like ads for a broadband internet ISP, and appear totally different from electorate ads. It’s a big no-no as far as integrated marketing is concerned. If they win, it’s because of an overwhelming desire for change on election day on November 8.
   Anyway, this first shot is from Wellington, at the end of Buckle Street. Car note: Kiwis love our mid-sized wagons—hence the Mondeo has been a big seller.
   Next, two from Auckland:
I don’t know whose idea it was to import this cockamamie method from the US. Things worked perfectly well without this one-vehicle-per-green system here. All it does is delay the realization that the motorway is jam-packed by a few seconds. It might work there but it’s a waste of resources here. About as useful as the cladding on the Daihatsu in the left lane. Like it would ever go off-road.
   Finally:

Since the road works at the end of my street earlier this year, making it look more like a driveway than a proper road, there are now more motorists who treat it as a driveway, parking with inches hanging out into the intersection. Here’s an example:

   Happening with increasing frequency, sadly.
   The street is hard enough to get out of because of the unsafe camber and visibility—these cars make visibility even worse.
   I hope we’ll get it fixed soon as at least four of the fourteen families on the street have expressed their unhappiness and a few of us have contacted the Council. The others have phoned; I have written an email, as readers of this blog have seen.

This has been, apparently, doing the rounds for a while, but I have missed it. It finally came on PDF today from a colleague. Normally I don’t have a lot of sympathy for law-breakers, but this gets extra marks for imagination.
   A Mr Justin Lee was booked for speeding, doing 116 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. This was issued by a police officer:

   Mr Lee wrote a letter, concerned about the above: Very clever—and cheeky. I should note that American English is not normal here, but Mr Lee probably had the wrong language installed on his computer; plus ‘grand theft auto’ is not used as a colloquial term, unless one is referring to a computer game.
   The police responded, unhumorously:

Auckland, as seen through the Mini Cooper Clubman’s door mirror.
   This isn’t even rush hour—and a good example of why I don’t think I could live there.

Damn, why weren’t the Bikini Bandits in force when I was last in København? I even was there on graduation day and for midsummer, with drunk students all over town.
   I wondered if this was real. As my friend Ian points out, the name of the traffic cop is too fabulous to have been made up. But the reality is that it is part of a governmental campaign to get people obeying the 50 km/h speed limit. Sorry! Scandi is not as liberal as people think!

(Des membres du groupe Pub!: je suis désolé que cet article est en anglais, mais je voudrais le partager.)