I’m a Brit who has driven frequently on the continent. I think there’s a couple of things at play here
We get more practice, so it’s just less of a drama
The people that feel less confident about driving on the other side of the road, just choose not to. My wife doesn’t like it, so I do all the driving overseas.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we all drive perfectly - I’ve driven ‘momentarily’ on the wrong side a couple of times when I’ve set off, but have corrected myself straight away. More common is for me to get in the car on the wrong side and wonder where the steering wheel has gone!
I’m RHD and so is Florida, but I almost got killed there a couple of times before I realized that drivers simply didn’t expect pedestrians to exist. Combine that with being allowed to turn right on red and any pedestrian is taking their life into their own hands.
Going the opposite direction, my coworkers and I all had the same experience mentioned by several previous posters: arriving in the UK we were extra careful about driving on the correct side of the road (the unfamiliar rental car and controls helped bring the point home). The first time back home in our own cars, the first roundabout, each of us almost took it wrong :smack:
Since the OP also mentioned the accident, the case and seeking justice, that is the part that got me. I heard originally the new report that the American should go back to face justice so the family of the deceased can have peace with this. I can’t understand this sense of peace. It is false at best to me. It’s not going to bring him back, it’s just going to cause misery to another. Taking comfort at the suffering of another seems sadistic to me. Yes that is the basis of our and most judicial systems but that doesn’t make it right.
Now if they simply wanted to meet her, and hear her statement/apology that would seem to be the civilized thing to do, though I respect that they may not be ready, or request it be done at their place or country.
I just came to say that I have never had trouble driving in Britain, but learning to look right when crossing streets took me much longer to learn. I assume that the explanation is that street crossing instincts were installed much earlier than driving instincts.
Australian here. Drove through US for a couple of months. I had three close moments in LA while I was trying to retrain my instincts.
There was no problem with simply forgetting what side of the road to drive on at all. Line markings, traffic and parked cars were always a cue.
The first two problems were the same. They involved coming out of a side street/driveway with a view to crossing a double carriageway that had a reasonable amount of traffic. There are several confusing, counter-instinctual things happening at once which you have to work out from first principles against the momentum of habit. First, traffic is coming at you from the left closest and the right farthest, so you are having to judge gaps the wrong way around. Next, turning across the traffic means turning left, whereas in a RH country it means turning right. For me, it was juggling this collective set of counterintuitive ideas that caused problems until I had habituated.
The third problem was parallel parking, and the associated problem of having a sense of where the right/kerbside skin of the car was. Perfectly easy for me in RH drive land. Not so much the other way. Had a minor bingle over that one.
Got over those probs quite quickly, except to some extent for the last. When driving RH, you get used to keeping the RH/drivers’ side close to the lane marking, and the LH side of the car looks after itself. But driving in the US, I never got comfortable with the opposite trick, of keeping the drivers’/LH side of the car close to the lane marking. I kept wanting to shy away from vehicles on my left, and hence invading the lane to my right. My wife in the passenger seat would continually have to tell me I was drifting. I got very good at picking other drivers from RH countries making the same mistake.
Yes, I find the same (British but have driven in Europe fairly often). The trickiest part is junctions involving dual carriageways. I recently spent a week in Iceland, where most roads are single lane (and often gravel roads where you basically drive in the middle). I had no problems until near the end of the week, having arrived in a larger town, I almost pulled away from traffic lights and turned in front of oncoming traffic because I had failed to anticipate which way the cars would be coming from. Fortunately I was paying enough attention to correct myself.
In my experience the most dangerous situation is pulling out from a car park or driveway when there is no other traffic around - it’s easy to turn onto the main road and set off on the wrong side if you’re not thinking. (I believe that was what happened in the case the OP mentions.)
Again, yes, when you’re used to sitting on the right hand side of the car as a driver, it is easy to end up with the right-hand wheels getting too close to the shoulder because you are so used to having your line of sight to the right side of the traffic lane.
That’s less of a problem if you are driving your own, right-hand-drive car in Europe, but that does bring a whole new set of problems, for example when you want to overtake and can’t see past to pull out.
As a bike rider, you have to look and plan well ahead and look each way twice, and assume everyone is trying to hit you, step out in front of you or just haven’t seen you - kind of sharpens up your awareness - even so large roundabouts can take a bit of getting used to the other way around, and French roundabout priority rules are completely different - in UK traffic on roundabout has priority, in France traffic coming on to the roundabout has priority
Not equally. If you grew up in the US, you unconsciously look at the near lane on your left, and the far lane on your right.
I learned to drive in the US, and when I moved to Japan, I took a driver’s license exam without much practice. During the test, I started making a left turn onto a major road (i.e. onto the near lane), and the examiner slammed on the brake. I’d somehow missed a semi approaching the intersection from the right. Immediate fail, of course, and I took a lot of lessons before taking the exam again.
Not sure about Bermuda, but in the LHT Caribbean countries I’ve been to all had LHD (left-hand drive) cars. That combination is a disaster waiting to happen with tourists driving.
I was taught to “look left, look right, look left” before crossing any street. I did manage to train myself to “look right, look left, look right” in the UK, but the few times I forgot the ingrained impulse to look both ways saved me.
Everyone knows look for traffic both ways, but it’s amazing how deeply instinctual it is to look primarily in the direction you grew up with. People think it’s simple, but it has to be experienced to understand.
(There’s the humorous anecdote about how there were only two vehicles in a remote fly-in Indian reserve years ago in northern Canada (They got there over the ice in winter). Within a few weeks, they had a head-on collision. People used to tell the story as a racist joke, but the truth is more telling about human instinct. Our keep right (or left) in traffic is ingrained from early and life-long experience. Someone has been driving around for weeks with no grounding in traffic laws and behaviour, and no other traffic, and then suddenly someone is coming at them at 40mph. They do what we do when walking - both go one side, then the other, then - bang!)
Proper traffic behaviour is very much embedded instinct deep in our brains, much as we’d like to think “how hard can it be to adjust?”
But to answer the OP’s question - there are so many cars in America, so many accidents, and so many fewer tourists than in the UK proportionately; any such accidents probably get drowned in the news of locals causing traffic accidents. Plus, as mentioned, a license is more difficult to get in UK, eliminating many less careful drivers.
You can know and practice that, or so you think. In your lifetime of experience you may never have seen a car coming from the right and without realizing it you might start stepping off the curb. I’ve caught myself doing it, so when in cities where one way streets are likely I’ll give myself a mental smack in the head to keep it in mind. Out here in the burbs, besides the fact that we never walk anywhere, one way streets are rare.
It damn sure does happen but does not usually cause an incident until it does and then they can be horrific. I was talking to two British people last night that both admitted they have done it by mistake.
I am no better though. I used to go to the USVI frequently where driving on the left is also the norm and I found myself instinctively driving on the right in a remote, mountainous area for several miles before I realized it. I was really shaken up by it.
I also caught an elderly driver attempting to take a very long interstate ramp going in the wrong direction on Thanksgiving years ago in Massachusetts. I blocked him off with my SUV but he kept trying to push past on the shoulder so I jumped out and grabbed him by the shirt collar to choke him so he couldn’t go anywhere. I made him turn around when he finally understood. I would rather be rude than see a family killed along with innocent people during a major holiday. Those types of accidents happen with alarming frequency too.
Winston Churchill was (somewhat) famously hit by a car while crossing Fifth Avenue in New York in 1931, when he looked the wrong way before stepping into the street. He later acknowledged to the police that the accident was entirely his own fault.
It was a relatively minor accident, although people have sometimes speculated on how the course of world history might have changed had Churchill been killed by that car.
I already said that this was not the place for discussing this specific case, and your question is not in any sense a factual one. This is a Warning for failure to follow a moderator’s instructions.
Absolutely. I’m American, but one of my good friends while I was living in Hungary was from the UK. He had been living in Hungary for many years and was for sure used to driving on the right side of the road. I’ve driven with him many times without any sort of incident, but, one night, for some reason – and there was no alcohol or drugs involved – when we got in the car and drove over to a band rehearsal, he pulled out and started driving on the left side of the road. It was completely out of nowhere. I let him drive about 5 or 10 seconds, before I remarked, “ummm…you might want to get over to the other side,” at which he realized what he was doing and had a “holy shit/what the fuck” kind of moment. It spooked him a bit.
So even if you’re well trained and used to driving on a different side of the road that your grew up and learned to drive on, brains do sometimes hiccup and revert to old habit.