Any studies about inherent superiority of driving on the right or left?

[Schnitte]

Driving on the right or left side of the road is a good example what has been called a coordination (rather than cooperation) problem: It’s a situation where you have two options A and B and none of them is per se superior to the other, and nobody has any in-built preference for either; yet there are very important advantages to be gained if everybody adopts the same option. Therefore, what matters is not so much whether people drive on the right or the left, as long as everybody in a country adheres to the same rule. Of course this is an ahistorical view of things, since countries don’t just make the decision out of thin air - there are usually historical reasons for why countries choose one or the other.

But are there, in fact, any inherent advantages for either option? I’m thinking along the lines of some biological feature that applies to humans, according to which, for whatever reason, we’re better at avoiding someone coming towards us if that someone is coming from the right, or the left. Have any studies to that effect been made?

[Arkcon]

I don’t have what you’re asking for – clinical peer-reviewed studies on which way is superior. I only have Uncle Cecil’s answer to the general question, pointing out how the entire thing grew up out of happenstance: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/634/why-do-the-british-drive-on-the-left

[King_Solomon_Hill]

There’s a mention of a study by someone called J. J. Leeming in this Wikipedia article, though I’m not sure how reliable his work is. There’s more information on this page as well, including the following;

In making these comparisons, Leeming noticed that countries where the rule of the road was to drive on the left had consistently lower numbers of road deaths than the formula predicted. The exceptions were Australia and South Africa, where the numbers of deaths were roughly in accord with the predictions, but Leeming thought that this could be partly accounted for by their low population densities, where incidental deaths (due to delays in obtaining medical assistance) could be significant, as described earlier. Excluding these two countries, the average death rate where the left-hand rule of the road prevails worked out at around two-thirds of the rate for right-hand rule countries.

Interesting.

[Mijin]

Well obviously a key difference is that far more people are right-handed than left-handed. So in the usual car configuration, where the driver sits to one side and the gears are in the centre of the vehicle, she’s either using her “good” or “bad” hand for the gears depending on whether it’s LHD or RHD.

The significance is obviously less if you’re driving an auto.

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WRT vision, it may be that we’re biased towards taking notice of things on the right. I’m basing that on slightly convoluted logic…
In cases of neurological trauma / ischaemia, a person can get “left-side neglect”: where they pay little attention to events in the left side of their visual field. “Right-side neglect” however is much rarer. The reason for this is quite complicated, and still debatable, but to cut a long story short it may well be that the right visual field is sort of processed twice, whereas the left side is processed only once.

So I’m hypothesizing that healthy humans may pay slightly more attention to the right side. I can’t quite complete the logic to say whether that would make LHD or RHD safer.