Posted on 09/05/2009 10:25:50 AM PDT by steven33442
It remains a curiosity and a bit of a historical mystery why the world is divided over something as basic as which side of the road to drive on. The fact that most people are right-handed has a lot to do with it; that's why, for much of history, travelers have stuck to the left. Ancient Romans using chariots are believed to have held the reins with their right hands and a whip with their left; to avoid whipping oncoming drivers, they favored the left-hand side of the road. It's also easier for right-handers to mount a horse from the left, so riders gravitated to that side to avoid oncoming traffic as they climbed on and off. Finally, knights and other armed travelers favored the left so they could do battle, if necessary, with their good hand.
The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there's evidence of a Parisian "keep-right" law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations he conquered, including Russia, Switzerland and Germany.
The U.S. has not always been a nation of right-hand drivers; earlier in its history, carriage and horse traffic traveled on the left, as it did in England. But by the late 1700s, the theory goes, teamsters driving large wagons pulled by several pairs of horses began prompting a shift to the right. A driver would sit on the rear left horse in order to wield his whip with his right hand; to see opposite traffic clearly, the teamsters traveled on the right.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
I guess we have made progress. In the old days, people would literally whip oncoming traffic. Now we just flash our high-beams at them, in order to temporarily blind them.
“Finally, knights and other armed travelers favored the left so they could do battle, if necessary, with their good hand”
Um, way I remember reading about it is that medieval travellers often walked or rode on the right side of the road, so as to keep their shield-side towards a potential threat...
and if the high-beams don’t work we just shoot at them.
“Despite widespread opposition to the changeover in Samoa, the government insists it’s prepared for the move.”
I guess they don’t have Town Hall Meetings...
Because we’re not all traveling in the same direction.
..or lob grenades.
I choose to take my half out of the middle.
Thank you very much.
It is either evolution or intelligent design.
We sit on the left side of the car because the huge majority of the population is right-handed. Freeing up our right side allows us to use our right hand and arm to do things in the car that need a higher degree of accuracy, such as shifting the floor mounted gearshift, pushing radio buttons, making rearview mirror adjustment, etc.
Because the chicken would NEVER be able to cross to the other side...
Some statisticians speculate the reason for this is that fewer left-handers die in auto accidents there, because when a driver reacts instantly to an unexpected obstacle in the road, their first instinct is to turn the wheel to which ever direction their 'handedness' would dictate to them to avoid it. So for a lefthander, that direction would be leftward and supposedly in a right-side driving country, that left-swerving instinct is more likely be a fatal action because it would send the lefty making the defensive move headlong into oncoming traffic, whereas in the UK lefties just swerve off into the side of the road.
So if this is true that lefties are safer in the UK, one would suppose that the reverse it also true: i.e., that righties are safer in countries where right-side driving is the custom. I'm thinking that the reason countries adopt the right-side protocol is just that it's simply safer for right handers who constitute a larger percentage of their population?
In Viet Nam driving on the right is customary rather than required. Most people drive on the right most of the time. The government is trying to regularize that by building barriers down the middles of the main streets in cities.When everybody drives scooters and the speeds are low(20 -35 mph lack of rules is probably the most efficient way. As more and more truck and automobile traffic appears on the streets the advantage of a rule becomes manifest. On the highways the bigger vehicles- cars and truhks drive in the middle of the pavement and shift to the right to pass oncoming big vehicles.
Europeans are backwards, why should we copy them and that includes their stupid metric system!
Dear Time:
Finally a topic you can handle. Please refrain from shilling for Hussein for the next 6 months and take up the truly important issues like why we drive on the right or how come rocks are hard.
Where I live everyone seems to drive in the middle of the road.
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