Think you know how to do a hook turn? Trust me, you’re doing it wrong

I clearly remember where it happened: it was a CBD intersection, with the car behind me blasting its horn. The sense of extreme isolation that enveloped me was sudden and overwhelming.

It was at that moment I realised there was no one left in the state of Victoria — not a soul — who knew how to perform a hook turn. Like the only survivor of an apocalypse, I was awakening to the realisation that I was now completely alone.

Does anybody in Melbourne know how to do a hook turn any more?Credit: Pat Scala

How did it come to this? After all, there’s nothing complicated about a rule that says you pull over and don’t turn right until the light on the road you want to enter turns green. Even if the intersection is clear.

From South Melbourne to Carlton, new hook-turn signs and road markings are appearing outside the CBD — often with no tram tracks in sight. It’s as though the government is doubling down on the one road rule that it hasn’t been able to teach or enforce.

So there I was: surrounded by people aggrieved by waiting the nanosecond before the light turns red, demanding those in front of them plough into traffic that’s still crossing legally.

This collapse of the 1939 rule designed to keep traffic off tram tracks, which until recently was as synonymous with Melbourne as the MCG and rail replacement bus services, marks the end of Victorian exceptionalism and signals societal breakdown.

And it’s not just hook turns. Whether they’re failing to stop for people getting off trams, running through bike lanes or chucking a U-ey without adequate notice, Victorians’ mounting impatience has collided with our rampant disregard for road rules.

Take the guy honking at me in the hope that I’ll jump the gun on a turn. What’s he going to do with the three seconds he saves while lawfully waiting for a light to change? What life-saving heart surgery is he off to perform?

Don’t tell me that it’s just confused interstate drivers or a few testosterone-filled recalcitrants thumbing their noses at our already permissive road rules. Try sticking to the speed limit on the Tullamarine Freeway and watch the other vehicles overtake you as though you’re standing still. The lawbreakers are a cross-section of Victorians.

Yes, it may be true that drivers have right of way at roundabouts and are legally entitled to make pedestrians give way. But why would we? Are we going to go home and write the great Australian novel with the time we saved by lurching forward in our hunk of metal and forcing back the woman in the mobility scooter?

Four hook turns at the intersection of William and Collins streetsCredit: Melway Publishing

One policy response to the problem could be a public awareness program illustrating the risks of impatient driving, like refusing to yield when two lanes merge.

The TV ad would feature a crying wife with her child at the morgue.

“Mum, how hard can it be to perform a legal hook turn?” the child asks. In tears, the mother answers: “Sweetie, if only your impatient father had listened to the handsome man he had been abusing at the intersection before this terrible accident.”

I prefer the law-and-order option.

In the 1970s, when it became compulsory to wear seatbelts in Victoria, my very European father thought the rules didn’t apply to him. Restraints were something for repressed Anglo-Celtic types, with their reverse parking, cucumber sandwiches and five-day cricket matches.

Then he got fined. Yet, he persisted. The roads were safer when he was allowed to express his unbridled, innate creativity in avoiding accidents, he claimed. Then he got another fine.

All it took was these two $50 payments to purge him of centuries of Italian spontaneity and transform a seatbelt recidivist into a model citizen, buckling up whenever he got behind the wheel.

I say we pay no attention to the whingers complaining about the use of red-light or other traffic cameras. We could do with more of them, preferably accompanied by a few more plain-clothed police officers wielding arm-loads of traffic fines. Just think of the money the state government could make — it would be like having the income of another casino, minus the money laundering.

For now, though, allow me to wallow in my solitude, as I observe Victorian society’s decline, one hook turn at a time. The shouty guy behind me may want chaos and anarchy on the streets of Melbourne, but I’m not moving until that light turns green.

James Panichi is a Melbourne journalist.

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