Just curious

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Poll #1331765]

Comments

[xinef.livejournal.com]

Each country should decide for themselves. Would be good if there was an international standard, but I don't really see any good reason, other than possibly cheaper cars, why frex the UK should have to convert.

(I was tempted to pick "let individual drivers decide for themselves", just for fun, but I'm not really an anarchist!)

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

"Have to", no. But now that a Londoner and their car can be in Paris in hours, and vice versa, it's a bigger issue than it was when the number was larger (pre-tunnel). Driving a car on the wrong side, i.e. not the side that car was built to drive on, is somewhat risky and I hear kinda hair-raising as well (I've never done that one; I've driven in three drive-on -the-left countries, but I was driving local cars that were in that regard well-adapted for local conditions).

Sweden drove on the left until 1967, even with land connections to neighboring countries, so apparently it can be done (Britain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are all islands, probably not coincidentally).

[xinef.livejournal.com]

What about India? There are also various Caribbean islands that drive on the left, but again, islands, so relatively easy to maintain and safe.

And yes, the amount of vehicle traffic between the UK and the continent probably means that this is more of an issue than it used to be.

What about countries that converted overnight? That must have been interesting.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

There's a Wikipedia article that includes Sweden's conversion; at midnight sometime in September 1967, as I recall. Apparently they mostly drove left-hand-driver-position vehicles to begin with, but drove them on the left side of the roads. So the conversion was simpler in some ways for them (and what a weird position to start out from!).

I'd forgotten India, I guess because I haven't been there. So what about Pakistan, then? The Caribbean islands are both small *and* islands, yeah.

[rgovrebo.livejournal.com]

Sweden drove on the left until 1967, even with land connections to neighboring countries, so apparently it can be done

And that's a major reason why they changed over - the borders to Norway and Finland are often only barely marked, so when going on a minor road, motorists might not notice that they should have changed sides.