Except on escalators in London, where the social convention is to stand on the right and walk on the left.
And of course no discussion of left-and-right-hand traffic in Britain is complete without reference to Savoy Court, a little square in London just off the Strand in front of the Savoy hotel, which is the only public street in the UK where cars are required to keep on the right.
There’s a similar place in the US, in Philadelphia, I think, where you have to drive on the left for a couple blocks. I think it also has to do with a hotel.
But in recent years there’ve been a number of bridges, freeway overpasses actually, built in the US where you drive on the left. They’re called Diverging Diamond Interchanges.
Another thing to mention about driving orientation in Britain are the “magic roundabouts” that exist in some cities. Essentially, they are large roundabouts (rotaries in US usage?) where the individual access points to the entering roads are themselves smaller roundabouts. The main roundabout and the smaller satellite ones have opposing directions of traffic - the main roundabout goes counterclockwise (as they usually do in RHT countries), the satellite ones go clockwise (as they usually do in Britain).
Americans mostly call them roundabouts, too. It’s mainly in New England that the term rotary is still often used as a generic term for a circular intersection. Traffic engineers make a technical distinction between rotaries and roundabouts, but most people don’t know about that.
If I’m not mistaken - in France, trains run on the left.
As an aside…
My wife travelled by train in her wheelchair recently and had to change at Southampton, a two line, two platform station (no island).
She had to change platforms but the lift to the underpass was out of service so there was a discussion about how to get her across. The outcome was that they switched the train to the platform she was on.
I do sympathise with all the people on the original platform who had to scramble to get across. I imagine there were some rude comments about incompetence etc, as they would not know that it was all for my wife.
She did the same journey on NYE and the train she was scheduled to catch was cancelled. They put her in a taxi to another station at a cost to them of £180. She can also claim a refund for the cost of her ticket.
In Southern Arizona, the UP runs left-hand in the stretch between the Tucson yard and the Cienega Creek trestle east of town.
One of the lines going east was the El Paso and Southwestern; they crossed over the old Southern Pacific main line at Cienega. Now, eastbound UP traffic goes up the easier grade along Cienega Creek, and westbound coming downhill goes over the trestle. They interchange westbounds back to right-hand running when running through the Tucson yard.
The eastbound line used to bend about a mile south of the current routing (and across I-10) to ease the grade; now that part of the line has been retired.
Looks like it’s just a few dozen yards of road representing the entrance to a car park or some such - presumably the arrangement is dictated by the construction of the entry/exit to whatever that is.
Surely that can’t be the only one of its kind?
I think that’s really because the main roundabout is really a small, tight, circular dual carriageway, punctuated by the satellite roundabouts, which are normal roundabouts.
Or in other words, unlike most normal roundabouts, which are compact one-way systems, the magic roundabout is a two way road that happens to go round in a circle.
It might also be of interest that the small roundabout at the main entrance meant that vehicles needed a turning circle of 25’ in order to navigate it. To this day, this is the legally required turning circle of all London taxis.
I wonder if there’s some internal feature of the Savoy that dictates it being made this way - for example to accommodate passengers getting out on the passenger side of the vehicle, directly onto a reception area
Common lore says it goes back to the days of horse-drawn carriages, and that the aim was indeed that the carriage driver could easily open the door so the passengers could swiftly get directly into the hotel.
I feel like there must be some other examples of that (although maybe they are more like sweeping driveways than actual roads)
Are you referring to when the up and down escalators are side by side? IIRC every subway station I’ve seen that had escalators conformed to this.
Come to think of it, the moving walkways in airports usually follow this pattern. The last time I was in an airport big enough to have one was…let’s see… at SFO, terminal 2. I remember that the conveyor belts were on your right, according to whether you were headed for the gates or the baggage claim area.
“The grades are more favorable that way”—this is awfully vague to me. Can you be more specific?
I assume you mean that traffic on the left doesn’t go as high and/or climbs less steeply as it goes uphill, but it’s hard to be sure.
When President Ripley began the ambitious double-tracking program between San Bernardino, California and Belen, New Mexico the two most urgent areas was Cajon Pass and Supai Hill in Arizona. Both lines featured tortuous 3% grades, and in both cases, the newer and more favorable lines where located to the “north” of the original. The newer grades became the uphill track (eastward), and the original mainline became the downhill track (westward). Though the lines were states apart, they had the same effect of forcing a pattern of left-handed running, where the only solution when it came time to complete the double tracking and signaling was to construct fly-overs, or go to the expense of signal bridges and cantilevers. On Cajon Pass, a fly-over was constructed 13 miles east of Summit at Frost, to return to right-hand running. In Arizona, a fly-over was constructed on the westside of Supai Hill 10 miles west of Ash Fork at Pineveta, but for some unknown reason, the AT&SF never built a fly-over east of Supai Summit to return traffic to the right. So from Pineveta, on to Williams, Flagstaff, Winslow, Gallup and Belen, the AT&SF ran to the left.
I appreciate your response—thanks. But I have to point out that the info you posted doesn’t answer my question—it calls the new tracks “more favorable” but never says why they’re considered to be so.
Again, I assume they’re a shallower grade than the older tracks—less than 3%. Is that right? If not, what’s more favorable about them?
Yes, the new tracks had a lesser grade eastbound but were north (left going eastbound) of the old tracks. Again, with CTC and over a dozen crossover pairs between Williams and Winslow it becomes kind of moot which side you’re running on now but running through a crossover slows down a train.
It’s still SOP to run on the left unless passing a slower train or circumstances force it, for example the westbound Southwest Chief has to be on the right at Flagstaff to reach the station platform. Watching ATCSMon when it arrives, we see the dispatcher switch it back to the left at Bellemont E (10 miles west of Flag) or Maine (18 miles W) even though the part that counts, Crookton, is another 60 miles west.
Not sure if you’d count in-city rail-based public transit as a “train,” but for the record, on the Paris Metro, the left-right orientation switches back and forth depending on the requirements of the station/route layout.