Roads....

In Back to the Future Doc Brown famously states, "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads". Well, here in NZ roads seem to be open to interpretation. Granted this is an observation from a person who experiences traffic from a pedestrian perspective. Perhaps I would see things differently if we drove. Perhaps not. Kiwi roads, I've noticed, tend to be narrow. Very narrow. Some are so narrow you might think, "They must be one-ways". Wrong. There are many streets here in Wellington that are much too narrow to be a two lane road. And yet they are. But it gets better! More often than not people are allowed to park on one side of the street shrinking the available driving space down to practically nothing. And yet you can still drive both ways. I know what you're thinking, "What happens when two cars meet?". It's a great question and we've been able to observe these meetings on many an occasion. It's always entertaining, and usually always on a hill. One driver, there's no way to tell which it will be until it happens, will reverse back the way they came. Then the other car will zip by and the first will continue on. Yeah. I think people are so used to this kind of driving situation that they don't realize it could, or maybe should, be different. I don't know?! Two actual lanes? One-ways? No parking on streets that are less than a lane wide to begin with? These are just my crazy ideas. I had to post about this because we saw it happen again as we left campus the other day. Cars were simultaneously driving up and down this smidgen of road. It looks big enough for two cars, right? :)