Here (scroll down) is a list of countries which drive on the left (via Oxblog). The reason that Britain (and Japan) drive on the left is that if you meet someone coming the other way, you need to be able to defend yourself. The point is obvious for knights on horseback, but applies equally to pedestrians: you want your strongest side to be presented to oncoming traffic. It still applies, in the sense that you use your dominant arm to do the serious stuff, steering, while your subordinate arm does the fiddly bits like changing gear.
So how come most countries drive on the right? Napoleon was left-handed, so when he was busy re-designing the world in his image, with new names for months and all the rest of that post-revolutionary zealotry, he decided that his armies – and traffic in general – would move on the right. The rest of Europe tamely succumbed to this imposition, with Sweden being the last to go in 1967.
What about the States? Seems like it was a fit of petulance after independence: if Britain drives on the left, we’ll drive on the right. Then, because the US produced most cars – you can have any colour you want as long as it’s black, and the steering wheel anywhere you want as long as it’s on the left – countries outside the British Commonwealth went with driving on the right. Thus was a counter-intuitive system imposed on millions of motorists. It explains why accident statistics are generally lower in the UK than in Europe, and why on the autoroutes and autobahns and autovias they drive so fast and so dangerously: they’re subconsciously reacting against a deeply unnatural set-up.
When countries that drive on the right eventually realise this, I imagine they’re going to feel pretty foolish.
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