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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if any of the left-hand side driving countries will make the switch anymore, or is the inertia too great and the benefits too small.

Sweden switched to right-hand side driving on roads in 1967. They had already 2 million vehicles, so that was a major operation. The change was made overnight but professional drivers got a few hours’ headstart to get used to it.

1960s was a bad time for traffic accidents in general, so the transient human cost of the switch was probably lost in the overall poor safety statistics. I wonder what it would look like today. 50% more accidents in the first month? Or more?

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Sweden never had many vehicles with the driver on the right though. Prior to 1967 Swedish drivers sat on the "wrong" side. Some drivers protested the change as they felt uncomfortable sitting close to opposing traffic (no word on why they thought their passengers deserved that).

On every trip, there’s a driver occupying that seat. On only a fraction of trips is there a passenger in the front pax seat. If it’s riskier to sit closer to traffic, arranging it so that’s a smaller percentage of trips is optimizing.

It's been said the better alternative to airbags for traffic safety would be a spear on the steering wheel pointing at the driver. Optimizing for whom?

I have read that some people wanted to keep an eye on the shoulder of the road.

Why? Is that where the interesting stuff happens?

At least it'll be good to not kerb the wheels, or when passing foot traffic on tiny/busy roads.

An an Australian who's travelled a little I can tell you that in their hearts of hearts people yearn to drive on the right. In no other country do I find myself doing the hallway shuffle more than this one. If we drove on the right that would at least eliminate the conflict between what people want to do and what the rules say we should.

I don't think it will happen anywhere major without buy in from a few countries at once. Australia might swap if Japan ever decides to swap as they currently do supply a large number of our vehicles. Having said that I see a pretty rapid switch over to Chinese cars over the next 10-15 years as they leapfrog Japan in regards to EV powertrains so we might be willing to switch independent of that to gain access to newer models faster.

Australia will 100% not be swapping. There is zero debate about this, there is zero will and there are far more pressing issues to deal with than adding this significant cultural change.

And I have no idea why Japan changing would be the catalyst.

Without Japan the market for those cars might no longer be tenable. Australia and New Zealand buy a lot of Japanese cars.

I don't think Japan will change drive lane in the future, but possibly used car export could be decrease for BEVs. Japan adopts CHAdeMO for fast charging but other countries don't, so it will become harder to export. Also China is becoming very strong BEV manufacturing country. For new cars, after EV transition and steer by wire system become popular, LHD/RHD will become minor difference for car designing.

6 of the 10 top manufacturers of cars in Australia are from Japan. That said I can't imagine Japan doing that, and to be honest it's not uncommon to see LHD cars on Japanese roads (American cars).

Australia doing that would weird, as I think it'd an eight jurisdictions to sign up to it. That said, I can see WA doing it absolutely.

Japan marches to their own drum and very stubborn. They’re never changing imo

Why do people yearn to drive on the right? Hasn't been my experience in the UK and Australia at least

What do you mean? What is the hallway shuffle? I can’t say I’ve ever wanted to drive on the left, as an Aussie, and don’t hear this sentiment even from people who collect LHD cars. I even own an LHD car, so I’m not being dogmatic here. I just can’t see the tangible advantage you allude to.

Yeah I am joking about the yearning as it's obviously not a thing people think or care about. The hallway shuffle happens while walking down a hallway when someone is coming at you so you move to the left to let them pass but they move to their right (your left) and then you do that stupid little dance as you both swap sides at the same time two or three times before you laugh and move past each other. In countries where people drive on the right this happens far less frequently, almost everybody consistently moves to the right and it's not an issue.

As a different Australian, I can tell you I have no inclination, latent or otherwise, to drive on the wrong side of the road -- I'm very happy to continue to walk, ride, and drive on the left-hand side.

If you're suffering hiccups of thought where you need to work out what to do when driving on the left - the hallway shuffle as you call it - this may indicate something more concerning.

(The Romans were right - and we dismiss their legacy at our peril! : )

> I wonder if any of the left-hand side driving countries will make the switch ... Sweden switched to right-hand side driving on road

You had my head spinning and I thought just at what side my steering wheel is when I stepped out of the car 5 minutes ago...

You got the sides wrong. You meant to say right-hand where you said left hand and left-hand where you said right-hand. Sweden switched FROM RHD to LHD.

Edit: Nevermind, I messed up myself - the steering wheel is on the opposite side of the lane you drive.

I too, got very confused

By my count based on population data from Wikipedia, the left-hand side driving countries have about 2.771 billion people, which is 34.5% of the world's population. That seems big enough to sustain right-hand-drive car production. Most of the left-hand side driving countries are grouped together in clusters or are islands. Suriname and Guyana, and Hong Kong and Macau seem like they might benefit from switching.

More than half of that is India. And high end vehicles such as the Model S are probably very rare there. So although true that it's big enough to sustain right-hand-drive car production, it might not be big enough to sustain high-end car production.

Surely new cars sales volume per year is far more relevant than population to car companies who are making product strategy decisions.

I'd be shocked if a third of new car sales today were RHD. (It was surprisingly hard to google for that data; I gave up after about 10 minutes of searching.)

It seems that the number of accidents actually dropped for a while after the switch in Sweden but it increased again after people got used to the change. [1]

[1] https://realscandinavia.com/this-day-in-history-swedish-traf...

They put it down to people driving very cautiously to begin with

Then maybe the take-home message is that countries should switch driving sides every few years just to keep drivers on their toes.

How would the cities handle this?

If it was something they planned for, would signs be reversible, and traffic lights visible from both sides?

Or would they pay people to slowly roll out the reversal, so that which side you should drive on was rather inconsistent?

> How would the cities handle this?

Popular argument might be for the driving direction to be local to the orientation of the sun for the majority of commuters to be able to use canopy to prevent glare. For example, north to south flow in morning (NYC) would be LHD & reverse in afternoon.

After the first few years it would be come too standard.

We'd have to up the ante each time.

How about left side until mid day and right side until midnight.

Year after you have to drive backwards.

Roads will be so safe.

Which, in hindsight, makes perfect sense. Making drivers feel unsafe is a core component of modern traffic calming.

Yes, speed bumps and busses running over the flexible bollards to drive head on at me make me nervous.

Mostly chicanes, narrowing, blind corners, and narrow roads with visibility limitations (e.g. shrubbery).

Wide open roads make people speed up, even unconsciously.

Most remaining major RHD markets are physical islands (Japan, UK, Australia, most of south-east asia) or cultural islands (Japan, India). So long as enough manufacturers can continue to make most cars with steering wheels on both sides, there's really no pressure. It's a total non-issue.

And once cars are driving themselves, they won't need a steering wheel on either side. Maybe this might take 20 years. Maybe it will take 40 years. But with the rate of progress in ML we're seeing today combined with the fact that the death toll from human drivers is a million people per year, it's a practical inevitability.

(I live in Australia, FWIW.)

It also shouldn't be that big a deal --- Subaru was willing to do a run of vehicles specifically marketed to U.S. Rural Postal Carriers (while ostensibly it was a run of the vehicles they were making for Japan already, it actually required some U.S. specific labeling and emissions equipment and so forth).

Oddly, Samoa went the other way only in 2009, switching to LHT to make it easier to import cars from Australia/NZ and Japan.

Apparently Rwanda and Burundi are considering it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic...

They're considering going the other way to left-hand traffic (right hand drive), because all their neighbors except DR Congo do so as well.

Sweden shifted to match all their neighbors. I remember when Okinawa switched back to left side driving (wheel on the right) at the end of occupation in 1972.

There’s little reason for any countries to switch either direction these days (more countries drive on the left and more people, mainly due to mainland China, drive on the right). And soon (on the timescale we’re talking about) people won’t be doing the driving at all.

Just a little napkin maths and I'm already into trillions of Pounds to update the UK road network. It's not just signage, many roads are shaped for the direction of travel which would need adaptation.

I'd sooner do without RHD Teslas than put that cost burden on the population.

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