1967 – Keep to the Left
In the early 1970s, I took my family over to France. There were seven of us, comprising my wife and I, three children (ranging from 6 to 9 years old), and my parents-in-law, all of us crammed into a Morris Minor Traveller. The Traveller was the estate version of the 2-door Morris Minor. It was distinctive, with a structural varnished wood frame for the rear body (made of ash), and two side-hinged rear doors. There was room in the back for some luggage, and all our camping gear went on a roof rack. We survived, but we must have been crazy!
Back in Scotland after six weeks away, it was time to go back to the university. As I was driving down the quiet road that led to one of the main roads into town, I was musing over our adventure. Although our car had a steering wheel on the right, France has road users on the right. I had learnt to be careful judging distances and clearances. It was a relief to be back on familiar ground. It’s hard to describe my amazement when I saw a car coming towards me on the wrong side of the road. Bizarre, after all that time in France to have a problem just outside Penicuik. I flashed my lights, sounded my horn, the other car slunk past on the other side of the road. It must have been a full minute later I realised I was in the wrong!
Now I’ve been living in the US for ten years. I’ve kept to the right, in a left-hand-drive car, without fail on roads with other users, but a couple of times I have started off on a quiet street on the wrong side, the last occasion some 5 years ago. When I am back in Australia, I think I will revert to driving on the left without thinking: it seems natural, somehow. It’s not just which side of the road, of course. There are more peculiar features to be addressed.
As a driver, the accelerator pedal is always the one to the right, irrespective as to whether this is a right-hand or left-hand drive car. In a manual car, the next pedal is for the foot brake, and on the left is the clutch. There’s no clutch pedal in an automatic car, obviously. That might seem to make things simple, but it isn’t. The gear lever (or automatic lever) is in the centre of the car. Swapping between left and right hand driving isn’t so bad when it comes to changing gear, because there’s no room for the lever on the ‘wrong side’. [i] However, there are some cars where the gear lever is on the driving column, especially for older US models, and a few car versions have the gear level poking out from the middle of the dashboard (which I consider, quite unfairly, a French aberration). To add to confusion, there seems to be no consistency as to where the controls for turning indicators, windscreen washers, lights and a horn may be found. From one model to another they switch sides, migrate to the centre of the steering wheel, or appear among the battery of switches and controls on the dashboard.
Since there is no consistent logic, we might go back to focussing on which side of the road is the ‘right one’. In 2021, 165 countries and territories have vehicles driving on the right, with 75 using the left. Fewer countries on the left, and they account for around one sixth of the world’s land area, a third of the world’s population, and a quarter of its roads. What a funny situation. Back 100 years ago, it was different, with 104 countries and territories with driving on the right, and the same number driving on the left. 34 countries shifted from left to right between 1919 and 1986, and 34 locally manufactured cars switched to LHD. What has been going on?
The issue as to which side of the road to use for travel goes back long before the advent of the motor car. The usual explanations have to do with the predominance of right-handedness in people, as it appears around 90% of us are naturally right-handed. As the major weapon for self-defence was a sword, keeping to the left would mean that you would be ready to repel or attack someone to your right. When I bought my first house, in Scotland, much was made of the fact it had a circular stone staircase that rose in an anti-clockwise fashion. As I was told at the time, it was intended for a left-handed person (the house was old enough to have been built in a time when most people carried a sword). Some attempt was made to persuade me I should pay more, given this distinctive feature: I didn’t, and now I wonder why I didn’t argue that I should have paid less, since the market was so limited!
Oddly enough it may have been weapons that led many countries, like the USA, to adopt travelling on the right. It has been argued that a right-handed traveller with a hand gun would carry there revolver in a holster to the left (below the arm), ready to pull out and use. Quick action preferred shooting from right to left, and hence travelling on the right side. Perhaps more relevant was to do with the control of a wagon: “The wagon was operated either by the postilion driver riding the left-hand near horse-called the wheel horse-or by the driver walking or sitting on a “lazy board” on the left-hand side of the vehicle. He kept to the left in both cases in order to use the right hand to manage the horses and operate the brake lever mounted on the left-hand side. Passing therefore required moving to the right to give the driver forward vision.”
Certainly, rules about sidedness were probably as much concerned with commerce as they were with sword fights or gun carrying. In 1669 the London Court of Aldermen issued an order to reduce congestion in traffic on London Bridge, and this specified that carts and carriages should keep to the left, the first known legislation to deal with traffic direction. Whatever the justification, keeping to the left continued for England and European countries over the centuries, although it was rumoured that Napoleon determined that vehicles should keep to the right in the countries he conquered. A good comment on French perverseness, but totally without any documentary support, or evidence of actual practice! Incidentally, one argument for keeping to the right in the US was that, as with so many other things, this was a necessary rejection of the ways of the ‘old country’!
Most horse drawn vehicles show the person in charge sitting up high, and to the right or in the centre. The very first ‘horseless carriages’ continued this, and so when the first motor car appeared, in 1886, the Benz Patent Motor Car had the driver sitting up high, and in the centre of a three wheeler vehicle, the engine behind the driver.. This pattern continued, and later the same year Daimler came out with a 4-wheel motor car, still with the driver alone and in front, and passengers sitting behind. Over the next ten years, many motor cars were produced by a variety of manufacturers, and each time the driver sat alone or on the right. However, with the introduction of the steering wheel in 1898, a central location was no longer essential. Car makers usually copied existing practice and placed the driver on the curbside. Thus, most American cars produced before 1910 were made with right-side driver seating, although intended for right-side driving. Such vehicles remained in common use until 1915, and the 1908 Model T was the first of Ford’s cars to feature a left-side driving position. By 1915, the Model T had become so popular that the rest of the automakers followed Ford’s lead.
The situation in Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century was a mess. Once drivers sat to one side, the situation for most vehicles after 1900, manufacturers seemed to prefer having the driver sit on the right. Curiously, this did not always lead to left-hand traffic systems. It seems many started with driving on the left, and switched to the right. This was true for Russia in 1917, in the last days of the Tsars, and much of central Europe around the same time. The pinnacle of confusion has to have been achieved in Italy. In 1901 the Italian Government decided each province could decide its own traffic rules, including which side for driving. Not surprisingly, each province went its own way, and so in the northern part of the country half the province were driving on the right and half on the left. Most major cities determined that driving should be on the left, and it took a dictator, Mussolini, to determine that all LHT provinces and cities would now move to driving on the right. That was in 1924, and it took over thirty years to sort out all the details, including stopping production of new right-hand drive trucks and cars.
The United Kingdom is a left hand travel country, and this was the reason why places like Hong Kong were also travelling on the left. However, even for the British there were complications. Gibraltar, which is really a tiny lump on the southern part of Spain, has travel on the right. In the late 1960s, the UK examined the possibility of moving to right-hand travel, and declared it unsafe and too costly for such a built-up nation. Perhaps they were worried about the ability of their citizens to make the change. Today, there are still four European countries using the left: the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and two small islands, Cyprus and Malta, both of which had been British colonies in the past.
Perhaps one of the best recorded instance of swapping from driving on one side of the road to the other came in 1967. Despite a referendum in 1955, in 1963 the Swedish state house decided to end driving on the left, and change over to the right. There were two reasons put forward for change, both pragmatic. First, Sweden’s land neighbours (Norway and Finland) drove on the right. Second, and a function of its small population, most cars in Sweden were bought from overseas manufacturers, and they were equipped with left-had drive. This was a challenge in a country with many narrow two lane highways, and accidents were all too common. A commission was established to educate drivers, even seeking advice from psychologists. On 3 September 1967, the changeover took place, Dagen H day. Had those four years of careful planning ensured it all went smoothly.? There are some wonderful photographs showing one of the main streets in Stockholm, and they shows … chaos (you can find them at Dagen H, Images).
That leaves the other and obvious problem: what happens if a right-hand travel and a left-hand travel country share a border and roads cross from one to the other. There are a couple of notable examples. Thailand has retained a left-hand travel system, and borders three countries where driving is on the right, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. In most cases the switch is managed by traffic lights, but there are a few complex interchanges that allow the switchover to be accomplished with the traffic low left unimpeded. This is also the case between Hong Kong and mainland China. In this case it will be interesting to see if Hong Kong is forced to go from left to right as it is increasingly absorbed as a province of China.
There is one more issue in this business of travel conventions, and that has to do with ‘giving way’. For the most part, rules and conventions control how vehicles join from one road into another. Major roads have preference over minor ones, and ‘stop’ or ‘give way’ signs are everywhere. It becomes trickier when cars join a road from a slipway, or when two major roads merge. Good manners suggest that the tactic should be like a zipper, cars joining alternately from one side and then the other. We all know good manners don’t always work! As is the case in so many things, aggressive drivers will ignore the zipper practice, and race out, oblivious to the angry commuters they’ve displaced.
The other area of confusion comes with roundabouts. The naïve driver is supposed to know that once on a roundabout a vehicle has priority over any trying to enter: that leaves the problem as to whether a car on the roundabout is about to leave! Once of the roundabout, you are supposed to indicate if you will leave by turning left or right from where you joined, while cars going straight (as it were) don’t need to signal. Do you think that system works? Of course not, especially as you may not know from which road a car joined. Today many roundabouts are chock full of lanes, and/or stop and give way signs, though these to little to improve behaviour.
More? There was, for a few years, a weird convention in Victoria, Australia. If you were driving down a two lane road (driving on the left) and decided to turn left, you had to give way to a vehicle approaching you from the other direction and turning right. That driver would, in effect, cut across you. The rule was abandoned, but there was yet another.
In the centre of Melbourne, there are still a number of ‘hook turns’. These work by providing space on the left of the through traffic at a traffic light, a waiting lane for cars wishing to turn right! As the lights turn red, the through traffic ceases, and the cars on the left pull in from of those now with a green light, turn right, and precede them down the street. Is that another case of ‘you have to have seen it to believe it’?
Travelling following prescribed pathways include vehicles on roads, trains on rail lines, boats on rivers and aircraft in flight lanes. In most countries, rail traffic travels on the same side as road traffic, but only ‘most’. Many railway systems were built using British technology with trains travelling on the left, and while road traffic switched to the right in several jurisdictions, rail often remained on the left. This is still the case in 24 countries. In addition, there are oddities: Indonesia reverses the more common situation, with trains on the right, and cars on the left. China had long-distance trains running on the left, and metro system trains on the right. Help!
Boats are traditionally piloted from the right (starboard) to give priority to the right, and international regulations mandate water traffic on the right. The same is true for air traffic. In aircraft with side-by-side cockpit seating, US regulations require the pilot-in-command (or more senior flight officer) to sit in the left seat, and this practice is almost uniform across the world.
The more you learn, the more you understand. It’s no wonder conservative parties appear to dominate in many countries. If everyone is required to travel on the right, keeping to the left is a tricky proposition!!
[i] There is a vast literature on the placement of car controls, which, thankfully, I will ignore!
