Why Britain Drives on the Left | Hacker News Reader

Why Britain Drives on the Left

theguardian.com

Wikipedia "Left- and right-hand traffic"

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

Historically, many places kept left, while many others kept right, often within the same country. There are many myths that attempt to explain why one or the other is preferred. About 90 percent of people are right-handed, and many explanations reference this. Horses are traditionally mounted from the left, and led from the left, with the reins in the right hand. So people walking horses might use RHT, to keep the animals separated. Also referenced is the need for pedestrians to keep their swords in the right hand and pass on the left as in LHT, for self-defence. It has been suggested that wagon-drivers whipped their horses with their right hand, and thus sat on the left-hand side of the wagon, as in RHT. Academic Chris McManus notes that writers have stated that in the year 1300, Pope Boniface VIII directed pilgrims to keep left; however, others suggest that he directed them to keep to the right, and there is no documented evidence to back either claim.

This has the ring-of-truth to me. There were different patterns of local conventions and over time as it became important for large-areas to follow the same convention, these homogenized.

Beware, it is easy to come up with explanations that have a ring-of-truth.

We drive 99.9999% on the left. Not 100%.

https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/one-road-london-y...

This (well, the opposite) happens in Brazil, too, but it's much more general. We even have a specific sign for this: "mão inglesa" (English hand).

Not everywhere in Brazil though. First time I saw it I was in my 30s, in Petrópolis/RJ. It took me by surprise and I almost drove into an incoming car. Luckily there was no one on my tail so I managed to reverse and turn correctly.

Oh, it's far from common, I know. I had to learn about it to pass the written exam in MG, and I thought it was so weird that I never forgot it.

Nice example!

I know of at least 1 place in France that drive on the right: https://www.google.fr/maps/@48.7861561,2.2221644,3a,75y,75.4...

Is that one place all of France except the road in the photo shown?

France drives on the right.

Sorry, I meant on the left!

There's an entrance to a car park in Twickenham that's similar. Holly Road is one way, and the car park is on the right. So you turn right into a reversed approach road. Then the leaving traffic doesn't cross the incoming traffic when it turns right back onto Holly Road: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4464047,-0.3311576,19z

I really dont get this

> The entrance to the Savoy Theatre is on the right hand side of the road

..depending on which way you approach from

> By approaching the hotel on the right-hand side of the road, either the chauffeur or the hotel's doorman was able to open the door without walking around the car

Except that cars have doors on both sides.

Seems like they just wanted to be special.

The taxi driver is sitting on the right hand side of the car. Driving on the right enables the driver to open the passenger's door without getting out of their own seat (London taxis have 'suicide doors').

Thank you. In the above commenter's defense, that was not explained in the article. I too was confused.

Trains do NOT everywhere in continental Europe drive on the left (not in NL, DE, PL at least), but indeed they do in France (and Belgium). Always struck as funny, because if driving on the RHS was about being different, you'd think trains would also. Maybe someone French has an insight.

Another thing I consider funny: all former Dutch colonies drive LHS. Napoleonic influence never got there it seems.

Actually, in the French Eastern areas that used to be part of Germany trains drive on the right and so I believe that regular trains between, say, Paris and Strasbourg change side on the way, but TGVs stay on the left.

Now, as to why French train drive on the left, it seems that this is simply because French railways started in the early 19th century by copying what the British were doing (although according to Google the SNCF's official position is "absolutely not!" ;) )

What does for a train mean "driving on the left"? Trains don't overtake, they don't give priority, they don't drive through roundabouts, for all what matters they could drive on top of another and the experience would be exactly the same.

Imagine you’re standing on a double-track section. From your perspective, the track on the left leads away from you, the track on the right leads towards you.

As to why: having this uniformity is useful in placing, eg, signals (which face in one direction).

Much more confusing in railways is which track is the “up” line and which is the “down” line.

I once read that the Paris metro drives on the right, specifically so that it can't interoperate with the mainline railways.

I wonder how true that is, though. The metro is sort of a glorified tramway, and trams have to operate the same way round as street traffic.

How would that make them not interoperable? A metro system is just an underground electric railway. The only serious difference is how the power is delivered to the trains, it's usually some sort of third rail instead of an overhead wire.

The whole "which side it drives on" is moot for trains. There exist regular railways with single-track sections that trains use in different directions. I've seen terminal metro stations with two platforms where only one is used, the train arrives and then goes back into the tunnel the way it came. Many metro systems have separate tunnels for each of the two tracks connecting two stations so this notion of driving on a particular side isn't applicable to them at all.

The interesting question is perhaps did the UK ever consider switching like e.g. Sweden did when they realized driving on the right was becoming the norm in the region? Being an island, the biggest reason would perhaps be that it was always going to be driving mostly European built cars from Germany, France etc, some of which will be models that aren't even sold to e.g. Japan, India or Australia, so the UK would risk being the sole market for some models' in right hand steering

If driving on the right was a French idea, and even 'worse' Napoleon's idea, I think the answer to your question must be: "over my dead body" (in Tim Curry's voice) ;)

That being said, apparently the UK government did consider swapping in the late (swinging) 60s but eventually decided against it. This was probably considered following Sweden's own change in 1967.

I think the island factor is huge. There’s no point where a road would need to flip from left to right hand driving, whereas Sweden has countless crossings with neighbouring countries. I just can’t see it ever being worth the disruption in the UK when every vehicle has a natural “reset” point anyway.

>There’s no point where a road would need to flip from left to right hand driving

There would be if they built a road tunnel.

Sure, they also would if they filled in the channel and established hundreds of miles of land connections to Europe. But last I checked they have plans for neither.

I believe the OP is referring to the channel tunnel.

The Channel Tunnel (French: Tunnel sous la Manche), sometimes referred to informally as the Chunnel,[3][4] is a 50.46-kilometre (31.35 mi) undersea railway tunnel, opened in 1994, that connects Folkestone (Kent, England) with Coquelles (Pas-de-Calais, France) beneath the English Channel at the Strait of Dover. It is the only fixed link between the island of Great Britain and the European mainland. At its lowest point, it is 75 metres (246 ft) below the sea bed and 115 metres (377 ft) below sea level.[5][6][7] At 37.9 kilometres (23.5 mi), it has the longest underwater section of any tunnel in the world and is the third-longest railway tunnel in the world. The speed limit for trains through the tunnel is 160 kilometres per hour (99 mph).[8] The tunnel is owned and operated by Getlink, formerly Groupe Eurotunnel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

Thatcher did want it to be a road tunnel but at least common sense prevailed.

Well, don't underestimate the dutch.

https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/damming-north-sea-good-i...

No way in hades would the UK ever switch. Few on HN are old enough to remember the fight over the kilogram. That was intense enough. In terms of being consistent with the outside world, the UK is more likely to adopt metric speed limits. That certainly won't ever happen either. Abolition of the monarchy and adoption of the Euro are more likely this century than metric speed limits. The concept of the UK driving on the right side of the road is in DrWho territory.

Switching now would be out of the question even for Sweden who isn't perpetually doing the opposite of everyone else. With modern infrastructure it's simply too expensive. In the 50s and 60s it was doable.

My question wasn't whether the UK would ever do it (now) but whether they did or should have considered it in the early 60s.

Not sure what I feel about the speed limits. Being part metric and part imperial seems like the worst of both worlds tbh. The pint is fine. You aren't going to do a lot of math with the pint. Worst case you'll wonder how many pints to a 50L keg). But mph is just terrible. I mean just do km/h when everything else is metric in terms of distance! Also, do L/100km not mpg (or km/L). The volume-per-distance is the one that composes mathematically e.g. in averages.

I think there would be some appetite but I cannot imagine the short term chaos it would cause. Surely it would cost the country a fortune and also I could see insurance companies driving up the cost of premiums.

It's also interesting that in the nautical world it is more universal. Boats everywhere keep to the right passing each other on the port side (the left)

Might be the same reason the left side is the port. (The right side is the side you have your oar for the right handed majority).

>Because the Romans did.

That reason kind of fails when you look at Italy :)

I think in the US it was common for people to drive on left, right or whatever before 1900. Then they had to chose a side. I remember seeing very old pictures of autos with the steering wheel on the right, and I believe even the center.

I didn't see it mentioned in those comments but I have heard that the United States drives on the right because if you were sitting "shotgun" on a horse-drawn carriage, and were right-handed, you would be most comfortable angling the gun off to your left.

That makes no sense. A carriage or wagon could be ambushed from either direction so it really wouldn't make any difference.

Query for the pile: why didn't the Guardian migrate this content to the updated responsive design like much of recent Notes & Queries entries. How old is this?

There's a mention of continental Europe driving on the right due to Napoleon. The story I heard is that in the French Revolution, many changes were made purely to make a symbolic break with the monarchy, and driving on the right was one of them. Napoleon then enforced this wherever he could as a symbol of conquest. There's every chance that this explanation is bullshit.

Interesting if true and may explain my earlier Italy comment.

I believe the rules of the road are a lot simpler when you drive on the left. Is it just me? Without any evidence to support this statement, I came to believe that driving on the left is actually safer.

Do you have an example? I have experience with both but can't imagine how it's any different when all the traffic patterns are constructed with the appropriate chirality.

Approx. 30-35% of the world’s population live in countries that drive on the left side of the road.

About 76-78 countries and territories drive on the left side of the road.

Many of these countries are former British colonies, particularly in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Oceania.

Notable countries that drive on the left include the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, India, South Africa, and New Zealand.

Only four European countries drive on the left, all of which are islands: the United Kingdom, Ireland, Malta, and Cyprus.

[NB: the above from perplexity.ai ... not listed but notable in my opinion are Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh. Apparently used to be the case in Myanmar but they also did a Napoleonic military junta that hates the Brits switch in the 70s]

> Notable countries that drive on the left include China...

Only Hong Kong and Macao drive on the left, mainland China drives on the right.

Which also throws the population statistics if I am not mistaken.

The statistics are right, if both China and India drove on the left it would be more like a 50:50 global split. And right-hand-drive (i.e. left-hand traffic) EVs would be a lot easier to come by.

If Japan were interested in making EVs (more than they already are), it would solve that problem well enough. BYD is making right hand drive EVs for the Australian market at least.

I mean, you obviously can get them, they just often come out substantially behind the LHD models, and some of the other (many) manufacturers may not ever provide them. Which, to be fair, has been a problem in ICE cars too.

For example, it's not clear if the Xiaomi SU7 is planned to have a RHD variant.

Oh - I have only been to Hong Kong. Actually I manually added China to the list and left the total 30-35% alone which stat I got from the perplexity.ai (I assumed it was a hallucination). I have edited the comment back tot he original. Thanks for the clarification.

One does wonder, if an AI is so untrustworthy that you pre-emptively hypercorrect(1) its output because you assume it's hallucinating, what the point is of using it to write an authoritative-sounding comment in the first place.

(1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

Artificial Intelligence meets Human Stupidity (frankly I am too lazy to manually fact check the definitive list of RHD countries for the purpose of a simple HN post - but I do want to get across that 30-35% of humanity is not just the UK - so I reached for the LLM and ended up thinking (hmmm - I have been to HK and they were driving on the left) and (hmmm - looks like the AI forgot China which it probably doesn't realise is a "notable" country) - so I put China in the list, was furthermore too lazy to redo the math so stuck with 30-35% since that was the "safe" choice). I submit that the real damage was done by using an "authoritative-sounding" set of words to present my seat of the pants guestimate and for this I stand corrected.

So, I'm fascinated, what's the motive for leaving these comments which are just a (frequently questionably correct) summary from an LLM? Like, if people want to ask a stochastic parrot, they can presumably ask one themselves; commenting with the output of one seems like a weird behaviour.

I felt that the prior comments were very focused on Britain (and, as a counterpoint, our European neighbours who drive on the right) and that there is a global aspect to the topic which would be appreciated by the global HN audience. Therefore I thought it would be beneficial to the discussion to bring in that a largish fraction of the world population lives in countries that drive on the left. Since I didn't know what that fraction is and I myself was curious to learn it, I used a popular AI search utility to find the information. When I had gathered the information I thought it was relevant to the topic and informative and that the best way to share it was to copy it into the post text field.

I'm not sure that my answer is that fascinating, but I believe that my motive was well intentioned and that the method was not unreasonable. In hindsight I should have cited my source so that others did not take an "authoritative-sounding" piece of text as gospel and that my role had been selection and a cursory edit.

Funnily enough I have been quite resistant to LLMs, but I am finding that they are a much better way to do research on the web than Google. I also believe that the reason many folks think that LLM is a step towards AGI is that humans are also stochastic parrots. Whereas parrots are not.

Please don't post slop here. I come here for human comments not confidently incorrect LLM output.

Edit: Also the United Kingdom is not an island, it's a union of nations across multiple land masses. Great Britain is an island.

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