Highway codes

Photo by ohad*

The other day while dri­ving home, Naomi asked me what the uni­ver­sal sign for “your head­lights are not on, please turn them on because it’s night­time and you’re being a com­plete idiot if you don’t turn them on right away”? was.

I told Naomi that I didn’t know, but that I had pre­vi­ously suc­cess­fully man­aged to get dri­vers to turn on their head­lights when I’m along­side them and sig­nal­ing with my free hand in a way that also could mean “you are very talk­a­tive, you know?”

That, com­bined with the clue­less night stealth driver’s abil­ity to read my lips which are say­ing “lights, lights, lights”, but which could also be seen as mouthing non­sense, such as “like! like! like!” or “ai! ai! ai!”, has worked on sev­eral occasions.

And when you’re not along­side the stealth dri­ver, how else could you, for his/her safety’s sake, tell them to turn on their lights. Flash your high beam at them to alert them to some­thing? In Aus­tralia, the UK and US, high beam­ing some­one can mean “I’m let­ting you have right of way, please proceed”.

In Sin­ga­pore, and espe­cially when taxi dri­vers are doing it, it means the oppo­site: “Get the fug­gout­tamy­way cos I’m speed­ing up just cos you’ve turned on your indi­ca­tor lights to turn and if I ram into you it’s not my fault”.

On high­ways in Malaysia and Aus­tralia, high-beaming cars on the oppo­site direc­tion tells you there’s a speed trap up ahead.

If high beam­ing or honk­ing gets the dri­vers’ atten­tion and you’ve pulled up along­side them, then you can some­how indi­cate to them if there’s some­thing wrong with their car, usu­ally by point­ing at their vehi­cle — “your door’s not shut prop­erly, your tyre’s blown, your skirt is hang­ing out of your car door and is being ripped to shreds…”

But it’s dif­fi­cult to point to the driver’s head­lights, unless you were in front of him and cran­ing your head around to tell him. In which case, your abil­ity to con­trol your own vehi­cle could be a lit­tle compromised.

So what is it? Is there a sec­tion in the high­way code that tells you how to do that?

Tech­no­rati Tags: motor­ing, sin­ga­pore, high­way code, dri­ving, cars, stealth