About a quarter of the world drives on the left, and the countries that do are mostly old British colonies. This strange quirk perplexes the rest of the world; however, there is a perfectly good reason.
Up to the late 1700s, everybody
traveled on the left side of the
road because it's the sensible option for feudal, violent societies of mostly right handed people.
Jousting knights with their
lances under their right arm naturally passed on each other's right, and if you passed a stranger on the road you walked on the left to ensure that your protective
sword arm was between yourself and him. Revolutionary
France, however, overturned this practice as part of its sweeping
social rethink. A change was carried out all over continental
Europe by
Napoleon. The reason it changed under Napoleon was because he was left handed; his armies had to march on the right so he could keep his sword arm between him and any opponent. From then on, any part colonized by the
French was right hand.
In
America, the
French colonized the southern states (
Louisiana for instance) and the
Canadian east coast (
Quebec, also the
Maritimes -formerly known as
Acadia). The
Dutch colonized
New York (or New Amsterdam). The
Spanish and
Portuguese colonies the southern Americas. So the
British were a minority in shaping the "
traffic". USA adopted the drive-on-the-right policy, which was anxious to cast off all remaining links with its British colonial past. Once America drove on the right, left-side driving was ultimately doomed. If you wanted a good reliable vehicle, you bought
American; for a period they only manufactured right-hand-drive cars. From then on many countries changed out of necessity.
Today, EC would like
Britain to fall into line with the rest of
Europe, but this is no longer possible. It would cost billions of
pounds to change everything round. In 1967
Sweden changed from driving on the left to driving on the right. Everybody expected the number of deaths on Swedish roads to go up in the first months after the change, but the opposite happened: Fewer people died! Why? Because everybody was driving more carefully than they used to. Thus, changing side actually saved lives, rather than
killing people.
snaund pointed out to me how similar the above info is to what was posted on this website:
http://www.2pass.co.uk/goodluck.htm
I would like it known that I gleaned the above contents for this w/u from the Nethercutt Collection Museum in San Sylmar, CA. I used key phrases from one of their brochures, and I suppose they copied their info from the above website.