Ask Phoebe: Motorway signs follow US model

Motorway North Shore Road. Photo / APN

Q. What is the name of the font or typeface used on motorway signage? Do the capital letters use a different font than the lowercase ones?

- Ian Morrison, Auckland.

What a jolly good question.

The NZ Transport Agency has this to say: "The answer goes all the way back to 1949 when most countries around the Pacific Rim, including New Zealand, signed an international convention on road signs and signals and opted in favour of systems used in the USA rather than the ones preferred by European nations.

"The font used in New Zealand has been adapted from one developed by the American Government's Department of Transportation.

"There is no name for the font but it is described in the Australia Standard as AS1742."

The agency says that while the font type remains the same, individual letters may differ in thickness depending on whether they are upper or lower case.

While that may sound a bit confusing, the priority is to make sure motorway signs can be clearly read to help people travel safely.

Q. I am often frustrated by other motorists taking the opportunity, when merging onto a busy motorway, to overtake (undertake) traffic on the motorway and merge (force their way in) at the last possible minute.

What are the rules governing the merging of traffic from a motorway onramp? Is it okay to squeeze around the guy in front who is already merging and then blast up the inside and aggressively push into the traffic as the last sliver of onramp disappears? If not, why does half of Auckland insist on this dangerous behaviour.

Also, could you clarify that it is the traffic already on the motorway that has priority and not the merging traffic.

Many merging drivers seem to think that it is a requirement for anything on the motorway to brake to let them in.

- Alan Brown, Auckland.

Your frustrations, shared by many, I suspect, are the result of bad driving habits and downright bad manners.

The New Zealand Road Code states clearly that when merging on to a motorway from an onramp, the merging driver should change speed to match the speed of the motorway traffic, use the whole length of the onramp to adjust your speed (ie, don't change speed suddenly just as you enter the motorway), and signal right for at least three seconds.

You must then move into a safe gap in the traffic, which indicates, to me at least, that motorway traffic has priority. You don't enter the motorway at a sharp angle, and once safely on the motorway, you then adjust your speed and following distance according to the conditions.

The NZ Transport Agency has been exhorting drivers to "merge like a zip" for at least 10 years now, but still the message fails to get through.

Merging like a zip reduces flow breakdown, improves trip reliability, reduces driver frustration, and increases safety.