Waitematā and Arthur's Pass traffic shots share a thing I'd call stillness-in-motion. Both strip the usual traffic chaos down to its bones: a single vehicle moving through a still environment, light catching wet surfaces or mist, and the infrastructure itself seeming almost as alive and present as the car. They're not images of congestion or urgency. The night has done its work of reducing everything to glow, reflection, and gradual movement.
The shared implication is that nocturnal transit from New Zealand carries a specific kind of attention. In both—coastal motorway and alpine single-lane—the scene frames movement as incidental to atmosphere rather than the point. The car exists in the image, but so do the pavement, the trees, the sky, the cold. Something about the hours after dark in the country seems to ask you to notice the landscape too, not just your destination. Whether that's inherent to NZ roads or just their particular treatment of rain and long shadows I'd lean toward the latter—these are two quiet highways, not necessarily one continuous story.