A friendly PSA from a Waikato native: your car has lights and you are allowed to use them.

If you grew up in Waikato, your educational achievement and livelihood depended on your ability to navigate through the meteorological phenomenon known as fog.

Fog is very common in the Waikato. While other parts of the country take great pride in the beauty of their snow-capped mountains or number of sunshine hours, Waikato people draw their strength from the region’s atmospheric superpower to cool moisture in the air, condense it into droplets and turn it into the thick white clouds that settle upon our lands during the winter.

Second only to the fog as the cause of the swell in a Waikato person’s breast is our ability to make our way through it. 

If you’ve ever sat across from those of us who grew up in the low-lying, flat and very moisturised lands of the mighty river-country, you might have noticed a slight glow to our eyes. They have an almost radioactive quality, honed after years of getting to school and work using only our wits, sight, ability to continually wrench winter school socks up past our knees, and the vastly underrated technical ability to locate a small but critical feature now available in most cars.

Little-known and secret lore of the Waikato dictates that in order to host your 21st there, hoisted upside-down upon a keg, you must be able to get a job at Fieldays handing out the jewel in the crown of rural merch, the cattle prod. To get that job, you must be able to drive to Mystery Creek in June in thick fog. You must know how to, delicately and with the greatest of ease, flick on the correct car lights. 

Fog is less common in Auckland but it does happen. In fact, it’s happened enough times over the last month for the “flights delayed fog Auckland” search to yield a rich and hearty winter feast of weather news to gorge on.

It was a thing of beauty to see the city blanketed in fog where I would usually see Rangitoto rising up from the harbour on my drive to work this morning.

Less beautiful, and a real test of my unnaturally illuminated Waikato eyes this morning, was what I couldn’t see. 

As I pulled out of my driveway, my headlights on, a car was rounding the bend, emerging from a dip in the road with no lights on. Because I have a hybrid car that makes no noise, plus what I imagine is a normal amount of concern about hitting someone, I don’t hoon out of my driveway. It is only because of this that I avoided the first potential collision of the morning.

Turning right from my street is always perilous due to the parking of large four-wheel drives blocking my view to the right, angle parking for the shops on both sides of the road, three bus stops and a pedestrian crossing. This morning, I may as well have been blindfolded. Two cars were invisible to me, their lights off, until they were close enough for me to hit them had I not sat at the intersection for a paranoid five minutes to truly ensure the way was clear.

I carried on my way, getting to a roundabout where again cars loomed like Jaws suddenly emerging out of the water, less visible and lethal not only because they didn’t have their lights on, but because a couple of them didn’t indicate. The indication issue at roundabouts, or even just when making simple left and right turns, is an all-weather problem and perhaps not just an Auckland problem. All I’m saying is that if you’d had to turn right onto a foggy State Highway One on your bike in Hamilton, using only your 12-year-old arms to tell the traffic of your intention, you might be a bit more cognisant of the other, quite useful set of lights in your car that tell people which way you’re heading.

My commute took twice as long as it usually does this morning, and I applaud the more cautious approach to driving that must’ve caused this slowdown. I also wonder whether we all might feel more confident on the roads in Auckland in the fog if more people knew which car lights to use when and the role they can play in allowing cars to be seen by others.

I suppose I should have been grateful when I was blinded by the light of a couple of cars driving with the headlines on, full beam, or for the dimmer glow of cars driving with just their park lights on, but this also isn’t the right way to illuminate your journey in the fog.

As Waka Kotahi advises, and the people of the foggy swamplands know, “if you drive with your headlights on full beam in fog, the light will just reflect back on you”. Dip your lights and “don’t just turn your park lights on. They are hard for oncoming drivers to see and do little to improve your vision.” Some cars have fog lights, but if yours doesn’t, just use your headlights on their regular old setting.

I have lived in Auckland for too long to claim any kind of “visitor from the Waikato” status, but I never feel more like someone who didn’t grow up here and instead grew up somewhere with “weather” than when I am driving in Auckland during “weather”. After this morning and several early morning drives this month, I don’t think Aucklanders know how to drive in the fog.  If I truly wanted to ensure I am chased from the city I now call home, I might extrapolate this observation about fog driving to say that any kind of weather seems to send Auckland drivers into a state of automotive ignorance where wipers, lights, following distances, indicating and brakes suddenly become as unfamiliar and foreign as a clear-sighted view across a Hamilton bridge on a foggy morning in June. I’d like to stay living here so instead, all I’ll say is turn your headlights on in the fog. Thank you.