Rules of the Road

[JHertzman@domain.elided]

Chris Piepers writes "If you vist the Alfa Romeo "museo storico" or just look 
at pictures of old race cars you'll notice that all the two seaters were 
RHdriven. (single seaters were mid-drive, if that's a word) For some reason 
or another, all the "right-laned" countries, chose to climb a hill 
counterclockwise, hence the need for RHD . . . so you could see were you're 
going along that precipice."

Not just the two-seaters, but the four, five, six and seven seater Alfas too. 
There may possibly have been an isolated car (before the 1900) with the 
steering on the left, but I have never seen a picture of one.

It seems improbable that all the right-laned countries abjured going from 
point A to point B when that entailed going uphill clockwise with the 
precipice on the left, and the most photogenic Alpine passes were 
switchbacks, left, right, left, right - and going uphill counterclockwise 
requires coming back down clockwise, and vice-versa - so that seems an 
unlikely explanation. As good as most, perhaps, but no better.

Legend, not necessarily convincing, has it that in days of yore the defensive 
postures of armed horsemen (who were by definition members of the nobility) 
dictated the rules of the road, and that with the age of revolutions the most 
ardently egalitarian counties reversed them, doing away with the symbols of 
privilege. Post-revolutionary France did govern most of Europe (but not 
England) for a time, and the countries which in various ways emulated France 
(like the revolutionary colonies in America) tended to follow the French 
model while the countries over which England exercised hegemony followed the 
British model. (My source for all that was the correspondence columns of "The 
Autocar" in the forties, but I have never tried to build a case on it.)

John H.

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