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Ross_K
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Post by Ross_K »

In another piece of useless news, traffic drives on the "wrong" side of the road in Portman Square and Savoy Court in London.

From Wikipedia:
Savoy Court is the only street in the United Kingdom where vehicles are required to drive on the right.This is said to date from the days of the hackney carriage when a cab driver would reach his arm out of the driver's door window to open the passenger's door (which opened backwards and had the handle at the front), without having to get out of the cab himself. Additionally, the hotel entrance's small roundabout meant that vehicles needed a turning circle of 25 ft (8 m) in order to navigate it. This is still the legally required turning circle for all London cabs.
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Post by Paul-R »

marlon wrote:Well they still drive on the left in Thailand and its nearly all Jap cars there .
But Japan drives on the left anyway so not sure what point you're making there.
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Post by Clogzz »

There’s sort of Western Samoa, and to the east, American Samoa.
Western Samoa was a colony of New Zealand, with English ways.

The main benefit of the changeover is that the many economic refugees in Australia and New Zealand will be able to send cheap second-hand right-hand-drive cars home.

The bus drivers are owner-drivers; there’s no government transport.
If they can’t afford door swaps, there won’t be any.
Getting off a bus onto the middle of the road is like landing in a village in all-day siesta. Image

Japanese cars look like they’re designed for American left-hand-drive; with the gearbox, clutch and room for the brake servo in front of the driver.
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Post by Old-Guy »

JohnD wrote:
Paul-R wrote: This dates back to Napoleon who decided that he wanted to change things for change's sake just to show how powerful he was.
Not only did he change sides, he changed from miles to kiloms.
It wasn't Napoleon but the French Revolutionaries who tried to change everything to a "rational" basis. The currency, the clock, the calendar, weights and measures. Driving on the right was just a minor matter. Strangely, the one fundamental change that never seems to have been contemplated was to change the number base from 10 to say 12 or 8 either of which make more sense.

The revolutionary clock of 10 hours of 100 minutes and 100 seconds in a day lasted less than a year, the republican calendar lasted a bit longer (1795 - 1805) - but we still live with the rest of the revolutionary lunacy.

The metre was supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole along the Paris meridian. Even allowing for a small error, the metre (first proposed by John Wilkins over 100 years earlier just happened to be almost exactly the same as the one unit of measure common across Europe and American - the cloth yard of 39½ inches.

Napolean's role in all this was that by conquering virtually the whole of continental Europe, and eventually placing various brothers and generals as puppet kings on major European thrones. These governments imposed the new French system on the hapless occupied nations. By 1815, when peace came after 20 years of war across Europe, reverting to the old systems was just too troublesome and expensive.
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Post by Paul-R »

Old-Guy wrote:the French Revolutionaries who tried to change everything to a "rational" basis. The currency, the clock, the calendar, weights and measures.
One of the more francocentric changes that they made was to try to wrest the global meridian away from Greenwich and place it through, yes you're way ahead of me here. Paris.

Unfortunately they also tried to decimalise the system as well and it was this, more than anything else I think, that made it unacceptable. Its remains can still be seen along the edges of some of IGN french maps.
As I get older I think a lot about the hereafter - I go into a room and then wonder what I'm here after.

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened.

"Trying is the first step towards failure" ~ Homer J Simpson​
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