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by Paul Taylor - Lakes Weekly Bulletin

It’s that time of year again. Time to dust off the decorations, break out the Mariah, and take your life in your hands as you try to navigate Queenstown’s crazy Christmas holiday roads.

From now to pretty much mid-February, the danger dial is turned up to 11. Obviously, there are the tourists. Thousands of them, packed into increasingly massive rental SUVs, like tanks, speeding along at 120kmh some of them, the drivers woefully unfamiliar with New Zealand roads, overtaking coach-loads of other tourists, circling roundabouts while reading the satnav, treating indicators as an optional extra. Then there’s us. The locals. Irritated, impatient, hot, distracted, arrogant. It’s early December and Kmart car park has already gone a bit Mad Max. Sketchy. No one is giving way. We both reverse out of our spots at the same time and whoever gives way is chicken.

And then, with all this, you add alcohol into the mix. If you read Crimeline on p6 this week, you’ll see a local man was stopped by police last Monday with an alleged breath alcohol level of 1981mcgs - almost eight times the legal limit of 250mcg. And this was at 3.30pm, just as school kids were walking home. I won’t speculate too much on this, as he’s due to appear in court, but in my 12 years or so working as a reporter in Queenstown, including covering the courts, that’s the highest level I can remember. He undoubtedly has some problems if that alcohol reading is correct, but that’s no excuse, and he’s not alone. Every week there are around half a dozen Queenstowners who are either ticketed for drink driving or taken to court and banned. It has been a problem for years and it’s not getting any better. When Queenstown District Court holds its first session in January, there will likely be dozens of red-faced locals of all ages lining up to go before the judge.

The police are pretty coy about how many drinks you can have and be under the limit. That’s because it’s based on bodyweight, how much food you’ve eaten, alcohol percentages, and other factors. And it’s also because they don’t want you to drink and drive at all. They scrape people off the roads, so you can understand why. It seems bizarre really, when you think about it, that we need to have a drink at all when we’re driving. I’ve always seen one beer, perhaps two, as the socially acceptable drink-drive limit, but why have any? Is it just about feeling socially awkward?

Even without alcohol as a factor, there are car crashes every week in Queenstown Lakes, and there have been three people killed already locally this year. At the best of times, you need your head on a swivel to keep safe. So perhaps this summer, we can just think, ‘actually, I don’t need a beer, I’m driving so I’ll just have a soft drink’.