Peter Calder: Left is right - but we don't have to be nasty about it

The Otago Peninsula photo op ... not parked in the middle of the road. Picture / Robert Penman

Overseas drivers can teach us a lesson in tolerance

My first experience of getting behind the wheel of a left-hand-drive car was a thrilling one. When the guy at the rental counter asked me what kind of car I wanted, I was about to say "the cheapest one", until I remembered that someone else was paying.

And so it was that I pulled into the traffic on West Century Boulevard on the northern fringes of Los Angeles International Airport in a red Mustang convertible with cream upholstery and 17 miles on the odometer.

Things went really well for the first 500m or so. I carefully eased through the traffic to the left-hand lane, and turned left at the next intersection with an assurance and self-confidence that evaporated when I saw, directly in my path, three lanes of stationary traffic. The front spots in two of the three queues were occupied by police cruisers.

As far as I could gather through the haze of my humiliation, no one turned a hair. Certainly no one blasted me with the horn, much less offered bellowed assessments of my parentage or intellectual capacity. And no one took my keys. Everyone just waited while I regained my composure and the correct side of the road.

In Italy, a few other drivers pointed the forefinger at the head (it means, "are you nuts?"), usually because I was driving the wrong way up a one-way street. But in the 10,000km or so that I have driven in other countries - mostly on the right and always in unfamiliar traffic management systems with strange signs - I have encountered almost universal kindness, tolerance and understanding. Other drivers have taken the view: the guy may be a halfwit, but he's a stranger here, so I'm going to cut him some slack.

The attitude is rooted in an acceptance that people in other countries seem to have arrived at that life in traffic is bad enough without making it worse by losing your rag. The best starting point is to acknowledge that we're all in this together and together is the only way we are going to make it out.

I thought of those patient drivers last week when I heard a Canadian tourist telling a radio reporter that she wasn't going to rent a car in New Zealand because she was afraid of the locals' reaction if she made a mistake while driving. It seemed immeasurably sad that a visitor to a country once famous for its easy-going attitude could feel that way.

A South Island woman who took the keys from a tourist driver set off a spate of similar actions. In one incident, a Dunedin man described in a newspaper report as "incensed" took the keys from a tourist who had stopped "in the middle of the road" to take photos on the Otago Peninsula.

His photograph showed a car parked well to the left, hard up against a clay bank. At least three-quarters of the road was clear - enough room for a bus to pass easily. It was not, it should be said, an ideal place to stop, but this was the Otago Peninsula, for goodness' sake, not Khyber Pass at rush hour.

The Otago incident was the fifth in a couple of weeks to make the papers. That's not a big enough number to be called mass hysteria but it was looking suspiciously like a moral panic.

Respondents to a Herald online poll asking "would you take keys off someone driving dangerously?" were split about 50/50, though I suspect quite a few of the yes voters read the word "someone" as "a bloody tourist".

There were a few contrary voices: my favourite was the motorcyclist who said that if he took the keys from every dangerous driver he saw, he'd never get to work. The Prime Minister reminded us that our own driving isn't too flash. The head of the Tourist Industry Association noted that "tourists" was often code for "Asians".

The rabidly righteous responses to all this - in particular the demonising of people who are our guests - made me wonder, what happened to the country where we would go out of our way to accommodate others. When and why did we become such a nasty, vengeful, angry bunch?

When we need the Prime Minister (who, as Minister of Tourism knows that courtesy has a dollar value) to tell us to pull our heads in and be kind to strangers, isn't it time to take a look at ourselves, rather than at tourists' driving?