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Comment by kinow | Hacker News Reader

Would be great to have - someday - everybody driving on the same side of the road. I wonder if space agencies have agreed to build space vehicles on a standardized side.

I moved from a country that drives on the right lane, to one in the Commonwealth, driving on the left lane. It's interesting the amount of adjusting it takes for you as pedestrian to get used to which side to make sure to look to before crossing, and as a driver (roundabouts are especially challenging in the beginning).

And not all cars here have the seats on the right side. You can find cars that were imported and have the driver seat on the left. Or old/classic cars too.

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>>It's interesting the amount of adjusting it takes for you as pedestrian to get used to which side to make sure to look to before crossing

You should always look both ways regardless of which side a car is driving on. Reason is that bicycles sometimes drive in the opposite direction as cars. Also, sometimes cars, for whatever reason, will drive in reverse.

>You should always look both ways regardless of which side a car is driving on.

This is true, but when I finally went to a right-side country (Czechia) at age 29, I discovered that contrary to what I believed, I must not be, because I kept only looking right.

Concur. I believe that regardless of whether you look both ways or just one, if you're not expecting cars to be oncoming in a certain direction you're unlikely to see them.

When crossing two-way streets in countries that are opposite my own, I found it's trickier than it sounds due to some subtle subconscious thing even when you look both ways.

I think they're referring to places like roundabouts where you can cross halfway and the traffic only comes from one direction. Cars would never reverse off a roundabout and it's illegal and pretty dangerous to bike into a roundabout from the wrong direction.

The last percentage of risk is whether you bother checking for things that "can't" happen because "nobody would ever do that."

In primary school, we learned to look 'left, then right, then left again' before crossing. This is really muscle memory for me now.

That would have to be reversed in a country with left-side driving.

You are correct to worry about cars in reverse. I was nearly killed crossing the road when some idiot decided that going at 50km/hr in reverse up a one way street was a wise idea.

The order matters too and is different if people drive on the left or on the right

>> It's interesting the amount of adjusting it takes for you as pedestrian to get used to which side to make sure to look to before crossing, and as a driver (roundabouts are especially challenging in the beginning).

Agree, but I have to admit that I don’t have that issue anymore even if I change countries.

On the other hand I never remember that my native country has a strict policy on punishing jaywalking while UK doesn’t. It’s even harder to remember since the streets in the UK have way more traffic.

> I wonder if space agencies have agreed to build space vehicles on a standardized side.

Because space vehicles often need to share space roads?

Not generally, but note that the Mars Climate Orbiter[0] was lost due to an SAE-Metric conversion failure:

[0] https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf

What does that have to do with imaginary roads in space?

I would also not consider a planetary rover to be a “space vehicle”. Being on a planet is rather the opposite of space.

It makes me much more cautious crossing streets in London than in a typical US city. I simply don't trust my instincts about where traffic might be coming from.

I think self-driving cars will come sooner, in which case road handedness would be far less of an issue.

I can imagine a bad OTA update could someday result in some vehicles going rogue.

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