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Comment by advantager | Hacker News Reader

On most mining properties in North America and elsewhere, driving is strictly on the left. This is because haul trucks have such large blind spots to their right side, it's best to give them a clear view of the side of the road (which may be a sheer drop-off).

I've done a fair amount of driving on site, and it's a bit of a trip. Usually right after the main gate there is a cross-over point where you yield and switch sides. And don't forget to drive on the right after you leave for the day!

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I heard somewhere that it used to be common in northern Italy to buy right hand drive cars (steering wheel on the right) for the same reason, it was better to have the driver at the edge of the road so that they could tell if they were too close to the edge on mountain roads with poorly defined edges and without crash barriers.

And the same in Sweden but the other way around - most cars had the steering wheel on the left even before driving on the right. Traditionally, it was better to be able to see where the narrow roads ended.

Interesting, I didn't know about the blind spot problem for trucks. Is there a reason we drive on the right in America, then? I kind of assumed we just randomly picked it because neither answer solves a problem with the alternative (or the country we copied randomly picked, I don't know the full history), but it seems like there's a pretty solid argument to always drive on the left (at least, there's no reason to drive on the right)

If America drove on the left, the driver side would be on the right instead. This would only shift the truck blind spot to the other side meaning they would still drive opposite either way.

Why do you have to drive closer to the inside of the street?

Probably because you are routinely driving within a few feet of traffic coming the other way and it's easier to tell where the edge of your vehicle is when you're practically sitting on it versus sitting on the other side of the car.

So that you can see oncoming traffic when passing on a single/two-lane road

Edit: redundant

That’s discussed in the article

The fact that we drive on the right is the precise reason why trucks have less of a blind spot on the left. (We place the driver's seat closest to the center of the road, while on a mine site it's better to be close to the edge of the road.)

If we drove on the left and built cars accordingly, then you'd see mine site tricks driving on the right.

Left and right are not inherently different in any way (except I guess for people being right-handed more than left-handed, though has little effect.)

Fun story: I was surprised recently by visiting one country that did things a bit differently: Burma. They drive on the right and have for 50 or so years… but they use mostly left-hand drive cars. So you'll see the driver's seat close to the curb. Took me quite a few taxi rides to figure out what that uncanny feeling was. (Also, they're one of the few countries with a timezone offset by a half hour increment)

Burma is a fascinating story. They switched, like Sweden, but without planning.

The reason? A fortune teller said the country would be prosperous.

And now people exit the bus into the traffic instead of the sidewalk. Because nobody has the money to replace the buses or cars.

That is fascinanting. Can you provide a source for this story about a fortune teller?

They could switch sides of the road, instead of replacing the vehicles. Moving and rotating all the signs is probably cheaper and easier.

Replacing the vehicles is effectively free, if you do it slowly as you replace vehicles anyway.

> except I guess for people being right-handed more than left-handed, though has little effect.

Eye dominance is also a thing.

I'm from the UK so the steering wheel 'belongs' on the right hand side. However, I've driven thousands of miles across Europe and Canada.

The only time I ever struggled with driving on the other side (other than the occasional lapse while doing a U-turn on a very quiet street) was driving over the Alps in a manual hire car, driving a very narrow road with hundreds of switch-backs, where my weak hand (I'm right handed) wasn't used to the task of steering.

I can't say I've ever noticed any difference in vision.

As the parent comment suggests, most people are right eye dominant so from a safety perspective keeping the dominant eye closer to the oncoming traffic is preferable. And even before cars, most right handed people mount horses from their right side, especially if they've a big sword on their left, and it is safer to mount from the side rather than the middle of the road. The story I learned when I was younger was that most of continental Europe, and the (at the time) pro-French US, shifted to the right because Napoleon was left handed, although it isn't quite that simple - see "Why do some countries drive on the left and others on the right?"[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869812 .

I talked to a guy at a gas station once with an exotic wrong way round car. He owned it because he was a car lover, but had come to prefer driving close to the kerb. He also enjoyed the lolz as other drivers did a double take when it appeared his dog was driving and he was the passenger.

These are special vehicles. Why aren't they built with the steering wheel on the right?

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