> There's only one spot in London where you'll have to drive like much of the rest of the world
That makes it sound like Britain is the only place with left side traffic. 35% of the world population live in countries where they drive on the left side.
it's arguable the "much of the rest of the world" could refer to number of countries rather than number of people, but I think "much of" applies to both so the author avoided the confusion.
one of cool road signs I saw years ago in Ladakh state on road from Manali to Leh. Funnily enough that 19h minibus trip sometimes went through valleys without any form of road, just used least uneven path. Not so funnily enough we had an obvious technical stop later when driver was banging with huge rock on some part of suspension for an hour, and luckily his caveman engineering worked well enough to get us moving again
There are some spots in the US where you drive on the left, albeit for a short distance and the road is divided. Still messes with my brain. E.g., here in the northern suburbs of Detroit (W. Big Beaver going under I-75): https://www.google.com/maps/@42.5620634,-83.1581674,18z
This is kinda like that point where Hong Kong (RHD) traffic meets mainland China traffic (LHD) IIRC. You have to do a little dance to get everyone on the same plan.
> After December 31, 2022, any data derived from or published as a result of surveying, mapping, or any other activity within the U.S. that is expressed in terms of feet shall only be based on the “foot” equal to 0.3048 meter (exactly), formerly known as the “international foot” in the 1959 Federal Register notice.
The US uses the metric system in some places, but that is not to say it is "on the metric system"- after all, all road speed limit signs are still in miles per hour, as an example. Fuel is priced in dollars per gallon. Consumer goods are almost always sold in measurements of pounds, ounces or gallons. People are measured in feet, inches and pounds on their ID cards and at doctor's offices.
Metric has made almost no inroads at all in anyone's daily life here.
I believe their point is that a mile is defined to be exactly 1609.344 meters, a gallon is defined to be exactly 3.785411784 litres, a pound (mass) is defined to be exactly 453.59237 grams and so on. These are all just weird multiples of metric units at this point.
Eh, I seriously doubt that we will be changing the distance a mile represents if, for some bizarre reason, a meter gets redefined. Likewise, pounds and gallons and so forth. These measurements "defined in metric" is really more of a "formal conversion rate" ala converting between degrees F and C.
It would be way more annoying for LHT countries to change to RHT than to switch from US units to metric, have to change literally every road sign, street light, road markings etc in the entire country.
Plus everyone would then be driving cars with the steering wheel on the wrong side for decades until the whole fleet got eventually replaced.
Countries have done it before, but I think there's a reason not many countries have done it since the mid 20th century when roads and cars were a lot simpler and there were fewer of them.
Switching to metric could be done gradually - replacing existing signs with metric ones only when they wear out, building new systems in metric while still using US units for the old ones.
There's no way to gradually switch from LHT to RHT, you have to somehow do a switchover in a day
And the US and various other countries (like the UK) effectively use hybrid systems for units for many purposes. Science and engineering in the US are heavily metric.
I used to think about whether we can get more countries switching back to LHT, but with Autonomous Vehicles that will no longer be much of an issue in 10 - 20 years time.
I am told that Left Hand Drive is marginally safer (all other things being equal) because of the preponderance of right-handed people. Driving on the left of the road places the right-handed driver's dominant hand on the wheel and dominant eye towards the centre of the road and oncoming traffic.
However this is not an argument in favour of 20th century style, non-autonomous individual vehicles as the main transit solution. There are safer and better ways. Autonomous Vehicles will hopefully play a role in that.
You'd also have things like bus doors now being on the wrong side (traffic-side), road curvature being wrong (e.g. motorway junctions and entry/exit ramps), let alone car mirrors and driver positioning.
Iceland did it a year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn, but since there was less then 200k people living there it was a much less dramatic change
Once all manufacturing is controlled by China, they could refuse to make cars with steering on the right or use Standard measurements, increasing pressure and eventually forcing the UK and US to switch.
There are enough standards that don’t have non-metric alternatives like the square drive of socket wrenches or a lot of bicycle standards. It’s very unlikely that they will get replaced
Bicycles are hilarious because the same sizes will be designated in inches or millimeters depending on where or why they are taken. E.g. handlebars are 31.8 mm or 25.4 mm (1¼" and 1") but steerers are 1" or 1⅛". Wheels of the same diameter will be called 28", 29" or 700 (and the diameter is actually 25½" but it's only called "622 mm"). And even when they use metric from the start for something that is not a standard fastener already they end up with things like 28.99 mm spindles (not to be confused with 30 mm spindles, which also exist).
Thank you for informing me that China is likely to take over all manufacturing when it comes to cars. I am appalled that there are no US, Japanese, South Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, Russian, or any other nations that manufacture cars.
It also sounds completely plausible that a binary choice like left hand or right hand driving can be switched in a way that drives a pressure campaign that nations will give into China on because it’s an easier short term choice and wouldn’t gain an immediate reaction to due to the enormous cost that would be rapidly felt.
In the eastern parts of Russia (well even in "central" Russia like Novosibirsk), there's a lot of imported Japanese cars from their second-hand market. These have the wheels "on the wrong side", but nobody cares, they still drive on the right.
The US drives on the right (which is the right) side. So why would the US switch? Its really just Australia, Japan, India and the UK that drive on the left. The other 190ish countries all drive on the right.
PS Your 240V electric grid works that way because when the US switched to 120V (in like 1900 or so), we sold all our old gear to you and you never switched. So now all your electric things cost more as a result and your electrical outlets will kill you. So your decision making on such things is suspect.
The US has a 240 volt electric system nearly everywhere. The exceptions are some industrial factories that get higher voltage. There might be a handful of houses that haven't upgraded their electric system since the 1950s that are still 120volt only, but that is very rare (I've heard of it, but never seen it). We use 120 volts to outlets (120 is half of 240), but the system itself is 240 volts.
The imperial system America uses is better optimized for quantities people expect to use in real life frequently without requiring awkward decimals or larger numbers etc. better ergonomics.
With imperial you have weird fractions instead of decimals. To know that 3/4“ is larger than 1/2“ I have to actively think, decimals come pretty naturally (which was probably different in times before people went to school and learned to do math on paper)
To know that 0.32 m is smaller than 43 cm I have to actively think, but I'm guessing you don't. I've never had to think about 3/4 vs 1/2. Even 5/16ths vs 1/4 is intuitive for me.
When we use fractions for measurements, the denominator is virtually always a power of two. The only one I can think of that isn't is a fifth of alcohol, which is really just its own unit at this point.
I feel like neither system is inherently better outside of familiarity and I don't care which is used I'm just tired of having to own two sets of tools.
Not a “road” as such, but it’s also quite common in multi storey car parks as well where a ramp is shared by traffic going both up and down to stop unnecessary crossovers at each level.
I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of those who haven't seen it before: it does not go anticlockwise. The"roundabout" in the middle is an illusion generated by the 5 normal roundabouts in a circle. There are no special rules.
It has a bad rep, but if you're used to British mini roundabouts, driving on it is a non-event. The regularity actually means it's simpler than other, smaller, but more arbitrary aggregations of mini-roundabouts.
So it accomplishes the baseline performance that just about every major intersection planned out in the last 100yr does of being navigable without serious confusion.
If it's so good why aren't there more of them? Not like England has any shortage of N-way (where N >4) intersections they could be used at.
The wikipedia page says "the roundabout provides a better throughput of traffic than other designs and has an excellent safety record, since traffic moves too slowly to do serious damage in the event of a collision" which to me sounds a lot like someone trying to spin failure to play up the silver lining.
I don't know why you expect me to be a partisan for it, given the best thing I said about it was "driving on it is a non-event".
Experimentation with junction design has been a good thing in the UK. Many of the designs are, however, attempts to do as well as possible in the space, because a better design would require compulsorily purchasing some people's houses or gardens. So, although there are not lots of magic roundabouts, there are lots of agglomerations of mini-roundabouts with slightly different topology , many of which are more annoying (but fit in the space, and keep traffic flowing).
However, it does seem likely that this is kept mainly because of its fame. I seem to recall that there was a proposal to replace it which was shouted down.
My first encounter with this was on a foggy November morning, and I had no idea what was going on.
There's another very similar but smaller one at Heathrow, next to the Hatton Cross tube station. That one has the added attraction of London taxis and Ubers traversing it at high speed.
There's also a part of the US where one must drive on the left: The US Virgin Islands. Driving there is more difficult than "normal" left-side driving (such as in the UK or Japan) because the cars in the USVI are standard US cars with the steering wheel on the left.
Sometimes, rarely, you find a bit asphalt in Brazil where you have to drive on the left and often it is signalled as "mão inglesa", which is something like "English flow".
Recently I discussed with some friends the relative merits of LHT and RHT, and we came to the conclusion that LFT was better because you could drive and shoot with your right hand. So LHT is great for drive-by-shootings. Curiously, no alcohol was ingested during this conversation.
It’s nearby London’s last sewer powered gas lamp.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/F...
> There's only one spot in London where you'll have to drive like much of the rest of the world
That makes it sound like Britain is the only place with left side traffic. 35% of the world population live in countries where they drive on the left side.
No it makes it sound like much of the rest of the world drives on the right.
In my country, Malta, we drive on the left too, but I drive a LHD car, so everyone can tell me I'm on the wrong side somehow.
Using total population is a bad metric considering India itself has about 2 out of 7 billion people.
Why wouldn't Indian people count?
it's arguable the "much of the rest of the world" could refer to number of countries rather than number of people, but I think "much of" applies to both so the author avoided the confusion.
they also don't drive on the left, they drive everywhere
> Left is right and right is wrong
one of cool road signs I saw years ago in Ladakh state on road from Manali to Leh. Funnily enough that 19h minibus trip sometimes went through valleys without any form of road, just used least uneven path. Not so funnily enough we had an obvious technical stop later when driver was banging with huge rock on some part of suspension for an hour, and luckily his caveman engineering worked well enough to get us moving again
The BRO signs: Border Roads Organisation. It's a semi-military organisation.
I watched a Waymo try to take this on last night. It drove on the left.
There are some spots in the US where you drive on the left, albeit for a short distance and the road is divided. Still messes with my brain. E.g., here in the northern suburbs of Detroit (W. Big Beaver going under I-75): https://www.google.com/maps/@42.5620634,-83.1581674,18z
It's called a Diverging Diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diverging_diamond_interchange
This is kinda like that point where Hong Kong (RHD) traffic meets mainland China traffic (LHD) IIRC. You have to do a little dance to get everyone on the same plan.
Thanks. There's one of these in Santa Fe, NM and I didn't know it had a name. I find driving on it odd but it works.
Also the whole of the Virgin Islands!
So near the savoy is a semi circle road https://www.google.com/maps/search/bush+house/@51.5128306,-0... which feels like a round about and and you are forced to enter it from the wrong way.
In fact driving in central london is a unique skill that I unwittingly mastered as I learnt to drive in zone one.
This means that I can out manoeuvrer a pissed off white van man in a hurry. Its like chess but more angry and slightly slower.
London will switch sides when America goes metric - i.e. never.
The US is on the metric system: The official definitions of US customary units are in metric.
For example: https://www.regulations.gov/document/NIST-2019-0003-0001
> After December 31, 2022, any data derived from or published as a result of surveying, mapping, or any other activity within the U.S. that is expressed in terms of feet shall only be based on the “foot” equal to 0.3048 meter (exactly), formerly known as the “international foot” in the 1959 Federal Register notice.
The US uses the metric system in some places, but that is not to say it is "on the metric system"- after all, all road speed limit signs are still in miles per hour, as an example. Fuel is priced in dollars per gallon. Consumer goods are almost always sold in measurements of pounds, ounces or gallons. People are measured in feet, inches and pounds on their ID cards and at doctor's offices.
Metric has made almost no inroads at all in anyone's daily life here.
I believe their point is that a mile is defined to be exactly 1609.344 meters, a gallon is defined to be exactly 3.785411784 litres, a pound (mass) is defined to be exactly 453.59237 grams and so on. These are all just weird multiples of metric units at this point.
Eh, I seriously doubt that we will be changing the distance a mile represents if, for some bizarre reason, a meter gets redefined. Likewise, pounds and gallons and so forth. These measurements "defined in metric" is really more of a "formal conversion rate" ala converting between degrees F and C.
> if, for some bizarre reason, a meter gets redefined
Miles, feet and yards were tied to the meter in 1893 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order).
The meter got redefined 3 times since then (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre#Summary_o...)
It would be way more annoying for LHT countries to change to RHT than to switch from US units to metric, have to change literally every road sign, street light, road markings etc in the entire country.
Plus everyone would then be driving cars with the steering wheel on the wrong side for decades until the whole fleet got eventually replaced.
Countries have done it before, but I think there's a reason not many countries have done it since the mid 20th century when roads and cars were a lot simpler and there were fewer of them.
Switching to metric could be done gradually - replacing existing signs with metric ones only when they wear out, building new systems in metric while still using US units for the old ones.
There's no way to gradually switch from LHT to RHT, you have to somehow do a switchover in a day
> There's no way to gradually switch from LHT to RHT, you have to somehow do a switchover in a day
You could do it in phases. Have the trucks switch over on Monday, buses on Tuesday ...
And we would want to do that because......
Because it would be the cause of much mirth?
We can take jokes…
Jim Davidson has displayed greater wit and comedy.
And the US and various other countries (like the UK) effectively use hybrid systems for units for many purposes. Science and engineering in the US are heavily metric.
I used to think about whether we can get more countries switching back to LHT, but with Autonomous Vehicles that will no longer be much of an issue in 10 - 20 years time.
I am told that Left Hand Drive is marginally safer (all other things being equal) because of the preponderance of right-handed people. Driving on the left of the road places the right-handed driver's dominant hand on the wheel and dominant eye towards the centre of the road and oncoming traffic.
However this is not an argument in favour of 20th century style, non-autonomous individual vehicles as the main transit solution. There are safer and better ways. Autonomous Vehicles will hopefully play a role in that.
You'd also have things like bus doors now being on the wrong side (traffic-side), road curvature being wrong (e.g. motorway junctions and entry/exit ramps), let alone car mirrors and driver positioning.
> It would be way more annoying for LHD countries to change to RHD
As a complete aside, 1 country has done this: Sweden on 3 September 1967 and "It was by far the largest logistical event in Sweden's history"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H
Iceland did it a year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn, but since there was less then 200k people living there it was a much less dramatic change
IIRC a lot more countries did it but mostly a lot earlier (pre ww2).
Back then it would have been comparatively easy, cars were slow and there were barely any street signs etc anyway
Falkland Islands did it for a brief second, though not by choice.
Once all manufacturing is controlled by China, they could refuse to make cars with steering on the right or use Standard measurements, increasing pressure and eventually forcing the UK and US to switch.
Hong Kong drives on the left, mainland China on the right.
And there's a fun little dance where the roads meet.
There are enough standards that don’t have non-metric alternatives like the square drive of socket wrenches or a lot of bicycle standards. It’s very unlikely that they will get replaced
Bicycles are hilarious because the same sizes will be designated in inches or millimeters depending on where or why they are taken. E.g. handlebars are 31.8 mm or 25.4 mm (1¼" and 1") but steerers are 1" or 1⅛". Wheels of the same diameter will be called 28", 29" or 700 (and the diameter is actually 25½" but it's only called "622 mm"). And even when they use metric from the start for something that is not a standard fastener already they end up with things like 28.99 mm spindles (not to be confused with 30 mm spindles, which also exist).
Thank you for informing me that China is likely to take over all manufacturing when it comes to cars. I am appalled that there are no US, Japanese, South Korean, Indian, Vietnamese, Russian, or any other nations that manufacture cars.
It also sounds completely plausible that a binary choice like left hand or right hand driving can be switched in a way that drives a pressure campaign that nations will give into China on because it’s an easier short term choice and wouldn’t gain an immediate reaction to due to the enormous cost that would be rapidly felt.
In the eastern parts of Russia (well even in "central" Russia like Novosibirsk), there's a lot of imported Japanese cars from their second-hand market. These have the wheels "on the wrong side", but nobody cares, they still drive on the right.
It's really annoying have the wheel on the wrong side. Makes it really hard to pull out of parking spaces, or overtake.
Mail carriers in the USA also have their wheel on the other side so they can reach people's mailboxes easily.
The US drives on the right (which is the right) side. So why would the US switch? Its really just Australia, Japan, India and the UK that drive on the left. The other 190ish countries all drive on the right.
PS Your 240V electric grid works that way because when the US switched to 120V (in like 1900 or so), we sold all our old gear to you and you never switched. So now all your electric things cost more as a result and your electrical outlets will kill you. So your decision making on such things is suspect.
The US has a 240 volt electric system nearly everywhere. The exceptions are some industrial factories that get higher voltage. There might be a handful of houses that haven't upgraded their electric system since the 1950s that are still 120volt only, but that is very rare (I've heard of it, but never seen it). We use 120 volts to outlets (120 is half of 240), but the system itself is 240 volts.
Would you care to cite the statistics you have showing higher per-capita accidental electric shock deaths? I'm struggling to find any.
Electric distributon costs less because less copper/aluminum. 120V exists because the US is plagued by lawyers.
The imperial system America uses is better optimized for quantities people expect to use in real life frequently without requiring awkward decimals or larger numbers etc. better ergonomics.
metric is only for science.
With imperial you have weird fractions instead of decimals. To know that 3/4“ is larger than 1/2“ I have to actively think, decimals come pretty naturally (which was probably different in times before people went to school and learned to do math on paper)
To know that 0.32 m is smaller than 43 cm I have to actively think, but I'm guessing you don't. I've never had to think about 3/4 vs 1/2. Even 5/16ths vs 1/4 is intuitive for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger
When we use fractions for measurements, the denominator is virtually always a power of two. The only one I can think of that isn't is a fifth of alcohol, which is really just its own unit at this point.
I feel like neither system is inherently better outside of familiarity and I don't care which is used I'm just tired of having to own two sets of tools.
American money is fully metric.
Bit of a stretch... It's a dead-end private road, also sometimes called a driveway, where the owner has their own rules for how it should be used.
I've come across a road like this in Singapore, although with a road barrier
https://maps.app.goo.gl/bEEvRkgGQPhfM7198
Not a “road” as such, but it’s also quite common in multi storey car parks as well where a ramp is shared by traffic going both up and down to stop unnecessary crossovers at each level.
Here's the road in street view:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7KQLmedYzCjdg5FA7
See also: The Magic Roundabout in Swindon. One of the only? roundabouts in the UK that goes anticlockwise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)
I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of those who haven't seen it before: it does not go anticlockwise. The"roundabout" in the middle is an illusion generated by the 5 normal roundabouts in a circle. There are no special rules.
It has a bad rep, but if you're used to British mini roundabouts, driving on it is a non-event. The regularity actually means it's simpler than other, smaller, but more arbitrary aggregations of mini-roundabouts.
So it accomplishes the baseline performance that just about every major intersection planned out in the last 100yr does of being navigable without serious confusion.
If it's so good why aren't there more of them? Not like England has any shortage of N-way (where N >4) intersections they could be used at.
The wikipedia page says "the roundabout provides a better throughput of traffic than other designs and has an excellent safety record, since traffic moves too slowly to do serious damage in the event of a collision" which to me sounds a lot like someone trying to spin failure to play up the silver lining.
I don't know why you expect me to be a partisan for it, given the best thing I said about it was "driving on it is a non-event".
Experimentation with junction design has been a good thing in the UK. Many of the designs are, however, attempts to do as well as possible in the space, because a better design would require compulsorily purchasing some people's houses or gardens. So, although there are not lots of magic roundabouts, there are lots of agglomerations of mini-roundabouts with slightly different topology , many of which are more annoying (but fit in the space, and keep traffic flowing).
However, it does seem likely that this is kept mainly because of its fame. I seem to recall that there was a proposal to replace it which was shouted down.
It was designed by the Road Research Laboratory and has been measured to have better traffic throughput than the conventional roundabout it replaced.
The Hemel one is more “complicated” but honestly it’s easy, you just do one roundabout at a time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempst...
My first encounter with this was on a foggy November morning, and I had no idea what was going on.
There's another very similar but smaller one at Heathrow, next to the Hatton Cross tube station. That one has the added attraction of London taxis and Ubers traversing it at high speed.
Oof that looks brutal
There's also a part of the US where one must drive on the left: The US Virgin Islands. Driving there is more difficult than "normal" left-side driving (such as in the UK or Japan) because the cars in the USVI are standard US cars with the steering wheel on the left.
Sometimes, rarely, you find a bit asphalt in Brazil where you have to drive on the left and often it is signalled as "mão inglesa", which is something like "English flow".
Recently I discussed with some friends the relative merits of LHT and RHT, and we came to the conclusion that LFT was better because you could drive and shoot with your right hand. So LHT is great for drive-by-shootings. Curiously, no alcohol was ingested during this conversation.