Smiles, waves and warm fuzzies - but it was Sunday

Yvonne Tahana gets familiar with the new give way rules. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Things were strange on Auckland roads yesterday - people smiled at me as I was driving.

Their faces lit up when I gave them the thumbs-up back. Who would have thought all that was needed for good road manners was a shake-up of the road rules?

Signs on the motorway warned that yesterday was D-Day.

We'd all seen the adverts - top of the T goes before me - it's an easy jingle.

But somehow, while approaching a T from the bottom end, that jingle had morphed into "top of the T goes after me" and "top of the T gives way to me" which probably doesn't even really make sense, except in an accident-waiting-to-happen kind of way.

I'd noted a few days before the rule changes that mates had been playing the "what happens in such and such a situation?" game. I tuned out of those conversations. But those situations were the ones I found myself in with a colleague yesterday.

She told me she'd failed four answers in the online road rules quiz, so I decided I was on much steadier ground to be driving, having failed none, if only because I'd not actually taken the test.

The Mt Albert/May Rd T-intersection is a goodie.

From the top of the T where I was, an oncoming blue people-mover prepared to turn left. I gave him the right of way, he waved and smiled cheerily, then I turned right. Warm fuzzies all round.

There were Mexican stand-offs of a kind. Traffic backed up for a minute or two behind two cars turning into the Mangere Town Centre carpark.

There was no heat or aggression in the drivers' gestures, though. From their awkward positions they tried to urge the other on, encouragingly.

An AA man in a roadside assistance vehicle was parked haphazardly reading his paper.

We pulled over. Any trouble?

"Nah, Kiwis are great drivers aren't they, I mean look at how I'm parked," he joked.

He had faith in Aucklanders' common sense. I liked his advice: when in doubt about turning, let the other car go, he reckoned.

That was on a Sunday though. The real test starts today.