Wrong Side

[SpiceMan]

Indeed.

[radioman]

Indeed you do drive on the correct side, the left side, as we do in the UK

 

Yes, there is no wrong side of the road, just the right side and the correct side.

[Mekong]

But why do we drive on the Left or the Right?

 

In the UK the reason for being on the left goes back to the middle ages, when passing someone down a trail you had to ensure that your Right Hand / Sword Hand was closets to an unknown incomer basically a defensive mechanism. Even when travel progressed from horseback to stagecoach we only had horses 2 wide and the coachman sat in the middle and could still defend his right flank.

 

Right hand drive came from the States, again from horse drawn coaches, since America had wider trails they tended to hitch up the coaches four horses abreast, for the coachman to control / whip the horse he used his right hand and sat on the rear / lefthand horse. In order to avoid collisions coaches passed left to left i.e. coachman to coachman hence the reason why USA drives on the right.

 

I am full of crap trivia hehe.

 

I am the same as Radioman, flitting back and forth between Left Hand along th Drive and Right Hand Drive Countries one gets used to it, pick up a rental at an airport and not realise where one is at, it's a dead giveaway when the steering wheel is on the other side but when I want to Mainland Europe to Dutch TT's or Bol D'Or in France on my Motorcycle I had a few near misses along the way.

 

 

RM

 

Have you got used to the roundabouts in Doha? Makes Milton Keyes and Stevenage seem like amateur town planners!

[SpiceMan]

Informative post, Mekong but "pick up a rental at an airport and not realise where one is at, it's a dead giveaway when the steering wheel is on the other side".

 

That doesn't apply everywhere. In the Bahamas, cars are imported from America but they drive on the left, with the steering wheel on the wrong side. The reverse applies in Burma where the military government thought that if they continued to drive on the left it could lead to left-wing political thinking so they switched to driving on the right. Unfortunately the buses were designed to drive on the left, so passengers now need to go out into traffic to board and leave the bus.

[radioman]

 

RM

 

Have you got used to the roundabouts in Doha? Makes Milton Keyes and Stevenage seem like amateur town planners!

 

There are now almost no roundabouts (traffic circles) left in Doha. Once it became clear that only a mere fraction of the driving population either understood how they worked or cared about them it became obvious that getting rid of them was the only sensible option to reducing the carnage. So now there are a lot of traffic lights.

[Flashermac]

I'd always been told that driving on the right in North America came about in colonial days because the wagon brake lever is on the right side. If two wagons passed each other on the left on a narrow road, they might collide and shear of the brake lever.

 

More useless information, vehicles in the U.S. Virgin Islands do drive on the left. The islands were formerly Danish, and no one wanted to change over. (Ironically, Denmark has since swapped sides.)

[cavanami]

Big help is driving is having the steering wheel on the "correct" side in the car.

[Flashermac]

Yep. I've driven a U.S. car on the left in Thailand. Really makes it fun when you want to pass some one.

[Coss]

I'm across to Nong Khao a lot, left hand drive in right hand drive country, takes a little bit of getting used to, but no real issues.

[Guest]

I was told that although American jeeps had the steering wheel on left, Gi's used to drive on the left hand side of the road in Thailand whilst stationed here during the Vietnam war. Hence Thailand followed the left hand rule of driving on the left ... Anybody know if this is true ?