How to drive in New Zealand
April 1st, 2018 at 12:16 pm (Travel)
Start by staying on the left. :)
I found some great resources to prepare for driving in New Zealand.
Check out this interactive driving video/game, which is a good chance to practice for any driver. It definitely tests your observation skills!
Some of the road signs that I found interesting or unusual are:
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Speed limit sign indicating that there is “no restriction” so the national speed limit of 100 kph applies |
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One-lane bridge ahead. The little red arrow means that you do NOT have right of way but instead traffic from the other direction (big black arrow) does. |
There are lots of warnings that it will take you longer to drive somewhere than you may expect. I saw this billboard a lot:
and this great reminder to take breaks:
One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the extensive construction going on everywhere I went, which certainly did make it take longer to get places. Many of the roads between cities were being resurfaced in various areas, so there was a lot of slow driving on gravel. In one place, there was a sign that we were driving on “wet concrete – wash car today” (!).
I also found that gas was much more expensive. Somewhat confusingly, prices are displayed in cents per liter (e.g., “199” instead of “$1.99”). I paid between $1.99 to $2.06 per liter, which works out to $7.50 to $7.80 per gallon (!). Giving how much driving I did, this ended up being a non-trivial part of my trip costs. An electric vehicle would make even more sense there :)