Left-side driving

[Jazzy]

Why do Americans drive on the right and in the UK they drive on the left?

 

[Josiah]

Because the Americans (and nearly all others) are right. The English and Japanese are well, as you know...


Serious, 3 reasons...

1. The great majority of people are right handed
2. After the Revolution and before WW2, Americans often liked the French better than the the English.
3. Henry Ford.


A curiosity: Sweden switched from driving on the wrong side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. They did that - everywhere in that country - over a weekend. This back in the 1960's. I would have loved to been there on that weekend to witness that.... Perhaps someday the Brits will also realize what is right... and have a weekend like the Swedes did.


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[Josiah]

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[tango]

Because the Americans (and nearly all others) are right. The English and Japanese are well, as you know...


Serious, 3 reasons...

1. The great majority of people are right handed
2. After the Revolution and before WW2, Americans often liked the French better than the the English.
3. Henry Ford.


A curiosity: Sweden switched from driving on the wrong side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. They did that - everywhere in that country - over a weekend. This back in the 1960's. I would have loved to been there on that weekend to witness that.... Perhaps someday the Brits will also realize what is right... and have a weekend like the Swedes did.


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To change would be a pretty major issue.

Many junctions would work more or less normally if reversed but every single car on the road would be the wrong way around. If the driver sits in the middle of the road they can see further down the road. If the driver sits on the right and also drives on the right a lot of visibility would be lost.

You'd also need to reposition just about every single signpost, so it pointed the other way and/or was moved to the other side of the road. That alone would be a huge undertaking.

 

[Josiah]

To change would be a pretty major issue.

Many junctions would work more or less normally if reversed but every single car on the road would be the wrong way around. If the driver sits in the middle of the road they can see further down the road. If the driver sits on the right and also drives on the right a lot of visibility would be lost.

You'd also need to reposition just about every single signpost, so it pointed the other way and/or was moved to the other side of the road. That alone would be a huge undertaking.

The Swedes did the right thing back in the '60's.... The Brits could too. @tango you are not suggesting that the Swedes are more able, more capable than the British are, are you?

IF they too had a weekend in which it all switched... well, I'd love to be there to witness that switch. I'll bet it would be a MESS. It was in Sweden.



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[tango]

The Swedes did the right thing back in the '60's.... The Brits could too. @tango you are not suggesting that the Swedes are more able, more capable than the British are, are you?

IF they too had a weekend in which it all switched... well, I'd love to be there to witness that switch. I'll bet it would be a MESS. It was in Sweden.

Honestly, you'd need a pretty compelling reason to do it and I'm not seeing any such reason.

There are a lot more cars on the road than there were in the 1960s, a lot more signposts and a lot more other infrastructure that wouldn't be trivial to switch. I suspect the population of the UK is also much higher than that of Sweden, which adds another complication.

On top of that it seems governments in general are far less capable of doing things right than they were in decades past. So if Sweden in the 1960s was a mess the UK in the 2020s would be a disaster.

It could be done, but it would be really hard to justify actually doing it.

 

[Josiah]

@tango

I've always understood that the Brits have been okay with accepting the Right Way, the Wrong Way and the British Way.


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[tango]

@tango

I've always understood that the Brits have been okay with accepting the Right Way, the Wrong Way and the British Way.
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There's a few quirks about the way the British do stuff. Distances are measured in miles but fuel is sold in litres, beer is sold in pints but milk is sold in litres, many metric measurements coincidentally happen to perfectly match the old imperial measurements (something that used to be 2lb is now 907g, for example), although a few places took the chance to slightly reduce things so when you used to get 28.4ml in a shot of spirits the chances are now you'll get 25ml. Because it's apparently easier that way (for the same price as before, obviously). Rounding a pound from 454g to 500g would mean either giving more or a price increase that people would complain about, so that's less likely to happen.

During Tony Blair's government it was often said that he was pushing a "third way" of politics. Critics said, with at least some justification, that he was striking a path between US-style low taxes and low public services and European-style high taxes and high public services, and offering us the third way of high taxes and low public services.

 

[tango]

I suppose in many ways it's like changing any system that's very well entrenched. Looking at the US healthcare system it's broken in so many ways and yet many people passionately resist changing it. Regardless of the political implications of any preferred approach and the inevitable situation where if one party suggests a change the other will resist because it wasn't their idea, how would you go about changing the entire system of providing healthcare while avoiding the problems of providers not being paid and individuals finding that their situation was such that they fell through the cracks and couldn't get treated at all?

At least with healthcare it could be done on a state-by-state basis if necessary. You couldn't even do that with driving on the other side, unless you could create some pretty impressive contraflow systems on all the roads as they crossed state lines.