When the ‘horseless carriage’ first became available to the public, was there such a thing as a driver’s licence? How did people learn to drive? I’m assuming there wasn’t a high volume of traffic, so what were the ‘road rules’?
There have been “road rules” as long as there have been roads. Imagine 20 carriages appoaching an intersection if there were no traffic laws. Chaos!
When cars were first introduced, people simply followed the same traffic rules that they would have if they had been driving a carriage.
As to how people learned to drive a car: trial and error.
Here are a couple of facts I found from a web search:
From Encyclopedia Britannica - Road Traffic Control - History:
*In First Century BC, Julius Caesar banned wheeled traffic from Rome in the daytime. Emperor Hadrian limited the total number of carts entering Rome.
Leonardo da Vinci suggested separating wheeled and pedestrian traffic.
In the 17th century, some European cities had enough congestion to require ordinances prohibiting parking on certain streets and establishing one-way traffic.*
This site, Car-UK, says that a Highway Code was first issued by the UK government in 1931.
Let’s see… My dad was fourteen or so when they started issuing drivers licenses in Texas (doing the math, this would be in 1935, give or take.) They asked how long he had been driving; he lied and said three years.