Any Difference Between Driving On The Left Or Right?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I would like to ask this of people who have lived in countries where you drive on the right side of the road AND in countries where you drive on the left side of the road.

Is there any real difference once you get used to them? I have a friend from NZ and she said it only took her an hour to get used to driving on the right, she says since the steering wheels are in the opposite directions, it’s all the same once you get used to it.

What about any people who have done this? What are your thoughts? Is it really just as easy to drive on one side of the road as the other, once you get used to it?

2

A friend of mine is moving to England in a week and was there a couple of weeks ago to look for appartments. He says it was a bit weird to be shifting with your left hand but he mostly had ‘trouble’ with making long right hand corners and tight left hand corners ( instead of the other way around). He said he had to correct a lot during said taking of the corners to make sure he ended up ni the right lane, also he hit a few curbs while taking the tight left handers. He only was there for a coulpe of days, so i’m sure these things will become normal after a couple of weeks.

3

Yeah, it’s pretty easy most of the time. The mechanics of driving on the other side are fine, although it can take a while to work out how close to the kerb you are.

The things that catch me out are turning left or right from a side-road onto a main road, especially if there’s no other traffic. It’s very easy to default to the side of the road you are most used to (in my case RHD), particularly if there’s no road signage or parked cars to give you a clue.

I worked at a popular tourist restaurant in rural England which was off a twisty side road with no road markings. We regularly had to sweep up debris from fender-benders after european tourists turned out of the entrance and took the first corner on the wrong side of the road.

LHD roundabouts (traffic circles) are hard though, it’s very very weird drving the “wrong way” round them.

4

It’s pretty much the same once you get used to it. For the most part, road signs, dividers, traffic flow, signals etc. will prompt you to stay on the correct side and you’ll get used to it pretty quickly. I’d say a couple of days to get used to it, and a couple of weeks to keep any prior conditioning from kicking in (which will happen for the first couple of weeks, but then your brain will actively override any conditioning).

A few things to get used to:

When I first switched from driving on the left to driving on the right, it took me a couple of days to not want to turn into the wrong side of the road when turning right or left at a stop sign. My conditioned brain kept wanting me to turn into the oncoming lane.

My left hand would hit the inside of the door when my conditioned brain would attempt to grab the stick shift. Oops, it’s on the right hand now. This takes a few days too, and for the most part you’re fine, except in those moments when your conditioned reflex kicks in first.

You tend to stick to the right hand side of the lane (instead of center), because all your life you’ve been calibrating with the curb on your left side. With a conscious effort to stay closer to the left or center of the lane, you get better in a few days.

Reversing. This one is not immediately obvious, but you have to turn the other way to look behind now. And I do more than just a casual turn of the head (almost a body twist, looking behind when reversing), so this took a couple weeks to get comfortable with.

Dexterity. I spent most of my life driving on the left, so my left hand has mastered the gear shift, and my right hand has mastered single-handed steering. Now, with a left-hand drive, the hands are switched. Under normal road conditions, this makes no difference. However, I’m kind of a race driver, so under race conditions, it takes a lot of practice and conditioning to reach the same level of skill.

Interesting side-effect of the switch: When driving, I’ve usually had one hand on the wheel and one on the gearshift (I’ve driven stick most of my life, and the roads I drove required constant shifting). So now, when driving with a left-hand drive and cruising down the highway, my right hand tends to remain on the wheel while my left hand stays down (like I’m used to doing on a right-hand drive, except now there’s no gearshift for my left hand to rest on). I’ve tried to re-condition it to have my left-hand on the wheel and the right on the gear shift, but my original conditioning keeps kicking in when I’m in cruise mode (driving down the highway, no shifting to do, listening to music, mind wandering). This hasn’t changed in over 4 years of driving on the right. When I’m aware, I make the switch, but if I’m zoned-out it goes back to the original conditioning.

5

Oh, and walking to the wrong side of the car when you’re getting in. This took more than a few weeks. When zoned-out (on the phone, in deep thought, etc.) your conditioning tends to take you to the side you’re used to.

6

I haven’t lived for any length of time in a left-hand country, but any time I’ve been in Ireland or the UK I have been able to shift to driving on the left with no problems

7

I moved from South Africa to the United States about five years ago. Overall driving on the other side is something that you learn very quickly. As others have said knowing what side of the road to be on is typically very easy: there are usually tons of cues (signs, other traffic, etc).

The thing that took the longest for me was getting used to being in a different position in the car. For a while it felt that I was sitting in the “wrong” spot in a lane, so I would have to fight a tendency to drift right.

Also, sometimes I would twist myself in a knot trying to pay a toll with my right hand.

When we went back to South Africa for a holiday my American fiancee noticed that I was much more coordinated driving the stick shift rental car than I was her stick shift American car (actually a Honda, but you know what I mean). I guess that means there is some muscle memory there, as a stick shift is what I originally drove in South Africa.

8

It may just be me, but since the gearbox is laid out in the same pattern, regardless of whether it’s a left-hand or right-hand drive car, shifting - especially downshifting - is counterintutive. I learned to drive in cars with the steering wheel on the left. Therefore the lower gears were closest to me, and to downshift - say from fourth to second - you pulled the shifter toward you and down.

So I find myself doing the same thing in a right-hand drive car, instinctively pulling the shifter toward me when I want to downshift - and end up in a higher (usually fifth) gear.

9

I had to drive an American style car in St. Thomas which drives on the Wrong side of the road, even then it only took 15-20 min to get used to it.

10

American expat in Australia here - I’ve been here for five years now, so I’ve pretty well got it down.
Like the others, for the first few days I would be consciously thinking ‘left side, left side, left side’ when turning, but I got the hang of that fairly easily. What threw me for a longer time was the position of the turn signal and wiper stalks.
Like in the US, the turn signal is on the driver’s door side of the wheel - in other words, on the right in Australia, but on the left in the US. Hitting the turn signal is, apparently, a far less conscious act than being on the proper side of the road; I frequently turned on the wipers by mistake when changing lanes or making a turn, and got to listen to the wipers intoning ‘dumb guy, dumb guy’…
Shifting was less of a problem, but as I drove an automatic for the first few years, I suspect I had sort of eased into it by the time I got a car with a manual. No problem at that point, anyway.

11

As to whether one side is actually better to drive on, I believe there sere some experiments during WWII on aircraft carriers. These are normally built with the island superstructure on the left side as planes are landing. But at least one was built with this island on the right side of the landing planes. They discovered that there were a lot more accidents on that carrier (where planes crashed into the island while landing). The Navy conclusion was that pilots tended to drift toward the right when distracted during landing. (They thought this might be related to most pilots being right-handed.) So their conclusion was that keeping the island superstructure to the left was safer.

So if this experiment is transferable from pilots to drivers, it would seem that driving on the right side of the road would be safer – if the driver is distracted, they will tend to veer off to the right, putting them into the ditch or parking lane, rather than into the face of oncoming traffic.

12

Years ago I rented a car in a left side country. It was not difficult to adapt.
The problem was crossing the street on foot. Here in the US the cars at the start of a crossing are on your left so you look left first. Down under you had better look right first.

13

¿Qué? All aircraft carriers I have ever seen pictures of have the island superstructure on the starboard side which would be on the right side of landing planes.

14

My first experience with left side driving was in London and, even so, it took no time to adapt. My next experience was also in London, but with a left hand drive car and that was a bit harder to get used to. I also said I was turning left, when I was turning right.

I found crossing the street in London a LOT harder to get used to.

A Norwegian I know was a student in Oslo in the early 60s before Sweden changed to right hand driving. He would drive to his home in Kirkenes, over on the other side of Sweden (near Russia in fact). He would drive late at night on these narrow deserted roads that snaked in and out of Sweden. When he would see another headlight coming down the middle of the road, he had to guess whether to swerve right (in Norway) or left (in Sweden).

This was actually mentioned in one of Cecil’s books.

15

Time.com just published an interesting article yesterday:

Why Don’t We All Drive on the Same Side of the Road?
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1920427,00.html

16

Besides the interesting anecdotes, I wonder if any neurological studies have been done on that phenomenon?

Because my first impulse was to say “once you’re used to it, it doesn’t matter which side of the road”, but then I remembered that the right and left side of the brain, and therefore the hands, are specialized for different things. So, although we use both hands when driving, is sitting on the right side of the car and looking out at the traffic from that side, and shifting with the left hand neurologically different from sitting on the left side, looking there, shifting with the right hand?

It would be interesting to hook up a bunch of good drivers to a simulator and an EEG (CAT and other scans) machine and compare
RHD,
LHD
people who learned RHD first, then added LHD
people who learned LHD first, then added RHD
and see if there’s a difference in which areas of the brain “light up”
and whether there’s a difference in performance.

Anybody need a topic for a dissertation? :slight_smile:

17

Moving from New Zealand to the US, I haven’t had much trouble except for one thing. In NZ when turning left you give way (yield) to someone who was coming towards you and is turning right into the same place. Now after almost ten years in the US, if I’m turning right I still have a tendency to give way to those turning left. I think my mind subconsciously rememebers the NZ rule that you give way if the other car would hit your driver’s side.

18

I think the longer you’ve driven on one side, the harder it is to get used to the other. In the end I found reversing the most difficult. For one; my neck simply didn’t have the flexibility looking over my left shoulder, and somehow my brain didn’t want to coordinate my eyes and my right hand either.

19

Ah yes windscreen wipers; the universal sign for “International Driver Turning”. :slight_smile:

Other than that I didn’t have problems with driving in the US – but as others have said, watch for turning into main roads, particularly out of one-way streets where there is no visual cue in the current street as to sided-ness.

Which it’s perhaps worth noting for the non-NZers is a weird and wacky rule that I think only we have, and which there has been talk of about dumping here… 'cos it’s dumb. :slight_smile:

20

I did just fine as mentioned above (same problems with wipers vs turn signals, stick shifts, etc.)

However, the mains ide effect I have noticed is my brian seems to have permanently swapped right and left.

Was in marching band and drum corps for years, knowing left and right was never a problem, until I started driving here. If you point I always say the opposite. I have to make and “L” with my left hand to tell the difference.

Haven’t driven in the US again long enough to see if it would swap back but I suspect it would.