Melbourne drivers off the road on courtesy

AS we all know, Melbourne is a far more civilised and welcoming city than Sydney. But why are Sydneysiders so much nicer behind the wheel, asks James Campbell.

Morning Punt Road traffic near the corner of Toorak Road on Wednesday, April 15, 2015, in South Yarra, Australia. Picture: Hamish Blair

I’VE driven in London. I’ve driven in New York. I’ve driven all around France. I’ve taken my life in my hands by getting behind the wheel in rural Quebec. Hell, I’ve even driven around the Amalfi Coast and into the outskirts of Naples before I remembered I loved life and turned the car around.

In my long departed youth, I did things in cars for which I am very ashamed. Some of which, I have to admit, involved alcohol. Which is a long way of saying that while I am not without sin — or the greatest wheelman who ever drew breath — I have seen traffic good and bad around the world.

And today I have a message. When it comes to driving, most Melburnians suck. Badly. They tailgate. They refuse to let each other in. They cut each other off. They change lanes at dangerous speeds in desperate and pathetic attempts to gain an advantage of few extra meters. In short, they scare me to death.

I was prepared to admit it could be me. That maybe I’m getting old, that maybe I don’t drive enough and now that what driving I am doing involves having two small children in the car, I am too nervous to be the best judge of other people’s prowess in the vehicle.

Even after twice nearly being collected on the freeway this summer I was prepared to accept I might have been overdoing it on the Melburnians-are-madmen-behind-wheel rhetoric — but after visiting Sydney several times in the past year, I’m convinced I’m right.

Now Sydney, as I am sure you know if you have driven there, is a traffic hellhole. It might have no level crossings but when it comes to public transport that’s the only thing that can be said in its favour. Indeed, living a 10-minute drive from a station is considered “close to public transport” in the eyes of the city’s real estate agents.

The harbour city’s streets are narrow, hilly, windy and clogged with cars. Big ones. But as a Melburnian, it depresses me to have to admit that Sydneysiders are much better drivers than we are. They don’t mindlessly change lanes every 100 metres and if you do need to change lanes, drivers slow down to let you in rather than taking the opportunity to speed up, as seems to happen here.

If you are entering a major road from a side street, people are happy to let you in. In short, even on the busiest freeways there is none of the uncertainty and excitement that makes a trip out to Dandenong on the Monash such a memorable experience.

For some reason Sydney drivers seem to have reached a Zen-like state of acceptance of bad traffic — that it is always going to be terrible, so let’s not make it worse by being nasty to each other.

Why they should be so easygoing behind the wheel is mysterious because in every walk of life my observation is Sydneysiders would slit each others’ throats for sixpence, but there you are. Melburnians consider themselves nicer, more community-minded — less greedy and grasping. Our talkback radio is civilised and reasonable. Life moves at a slower pace and we like it that way. Then we get behind the wheel and those qualities go out the window. Why that should be so, I’m be sure. My theory — and it is just theory — is that judging from the sour looks on so many Melbourne drivers’ faces, they think the state of the traffic has been sent by God as a personal affront to them. It’s as though they’ve never got used to all the extra cars on the road.

They act as though bad traffic is somehow temporary.

They think to themselves, “yes, sure the traffic is bad today but at some point things will get back to normal” — normal being the traffic conditions that prevailed in our youth. So for my father, anything that stops him driving as though it’s 1959 is simply not to be borne, whereas I vaguely assume things are going to get back to how they were in the early 1990s when commerce in this state had ground to a halt, taking much of the traffic with it.

Those motoring nirvanas are never coming again, of course. The traffic is how it is and won’t be getting any better this side of the grave.

Even expensive projects such as Premier Dan’s extremely popular program to remove 50 level crossings is going to turn out to be something of a disappointment, I fear. Yes, level crossings are an inconvenience and getting rid of them will make traffic flow more freely, but will it really make that much of difference? And is getting rid of 50 level crossings really the best use of the $6 billion we are going to get from the last thing we have worth privatising?

Wouldn’t we be better off spending the money on something else and just learning to calm down when we’re out on the road?

JAMES CAMPBELL IS A SUNDAY HERALD SUN COLUMNIST

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