Should we drive on the right?

luckat

What do you think? Pros and cons?

seamus

*shrug*

Don't think it would make a whole lot of difference. Given that we're an island, integration problems (with countries who drive on the right) are non-existent, and there would quite a few accidents while the population tried to get it straight in their head. Think of the women!

BrianD3

It might make life easier because certain vehicles would be more reliable, easier to work on and more comfortable. Why? Because many cars are generally designed with LHD in mind and the RHD versions of the same car can be compromised. I'm thinking primarily of Italian and French cars here. Certain jobs like changing a heater matrix or a brake master cylinder can be trivial on a LHD car but a bollox in RHD. Clutch cables can break on front wheel drive RHD cars because the gearbox is on the "wrong" side for RHD so the clutch cable has to make a detour around the engine to get to it and therefore is more strained. Driving positions can also be worse and less comfortable in RHD than in the LHD original. The final point is that all european cars have the indicator stalk on the wrong side for RHD. The indicator stalk should be on the opposite side to the gearlever. That way you can steer and operate the indicator stalk with your right hand/fingers and change gear with your left. You cannot do this if the indicator stalk is on the same side as the gearlever! The japanese had the right setup for many years for RHD (gears on left, indicators on right) but ironically they changed to suit European tastes where it is seen as "normal" to have the indciator stalk on the left - even in RHD!

BrianD3

John R

What purpose would it serve?
It would be a colossal waste of resources and be a huge disruption for no benefit.

Tommy Vercetti

well, since we are having difficulty even changing from mph to kmh, I think we should leave well alone!

jlang

I'm not one for saying we should copy the English but the only country we have a land border with is the UK. It would be bizarre to change without them changing too, but equally, if they change, we probably should too.

John R

BrianD3 wrote:

It might make life easier because certain vehicles would be more reliable, easier to work on and more comfortable. Why? Because many cars are generally designed with LHD in mind and the RHD versions of the same car can be compromised. I'm thinking primarily of Italian and French cars here. Certain jobs like changing a heater matrix or a brake master cylinder can be trivial on a LHD car but a bollox in RHD. Clutch cables can break on front wheel drive RHD cars because the gearbox is on the "wrong" side for RHD so the clutch cable has to make a detour around the engine to get to it and therefore is more strained. Driving positions can also be worse and less comfortable in RHD than in the LHD original. The final point is that all european cars have the indicator stalk on the wrong side for RHD. The indicator stalk should be on the opposite side to the gearlever. That way you can steer and operate the indicator stalk with your right hand/fingers and change gear with your left. You cannot do this if the indicator stalk is on the same side as the gearlever! The japanese had the right setup for many years for RHD (gears on left, indicators on right) but ironically they changed to suit European tastes where it is seen as "normal" to have the indciator stalk on the left - even in RHD!

BrianD3

Italian and French cars break down and are difficult to service because they are poorly designed and shoddily manufactured, they don't bother to properly convert them for RHD because they can't be bothered and because we accept the crap they give us.

I drove a Peugeot 206 in the rain recently and I couldn't believe that they don't even bother to reverse the wipers, I am not exactly tall (5 foot 10 inches) and had to hunch down to see out properly.

The solution to this is don't buy these defective vehicles not change the entire infrastructure of the country costing hundreds of millions.

John R

Tommy Vercetti wrote:

well, since we are having difficulty even changing from mph to kmh, I think we should leave well alone!

And why exactly are we doing that, another pointless waste of money and resources. It's not as if there are no major problems in this country that we have to look for this sort of petty crap to waste our public funds on.

Tommy Vercetti

John R wrote:

And why exactly are we doing that, another pointless waste of money and resources. It's not as if there are no major problems in this country that we have to look for this sort of petty crap to waste our public funds on.

true, I mean if tourists have to contend with driving on the other side of the road then I think they can manage to figure out the mph/kmh thing

Maybe someone in govt. has a vested interest in sign making

aidan_walsh

Ah, man... I'm just think of what would happen with a Euro like introduction... Every public vehicle would have to be grounded for a certain time... How you'd get every private driver to stop is beyond me.

Tommy Vercetti

they'd probably have a 6 month transition period where you could drive wherever you wanted to! a bit like normal then

luckat

Sweden changed without fuss something like 30 years back. I figure it'd be safer because of economies of scale - all those Mercs and Volvos and Saabs and Volkses, not to mention Chevys and Chryslers, made to drive on the right. Easier for th'oul tourists to remember which way to look.

But as jlang points out, it'd be crazy to start driving on the right while we have a quarter of the island driving on the left.

As for kph/mph, I think we should change completely to metric. It's a simpler system *if* you're using that and nothing else. It's this dithering that's messy. I mean, we nominally changed over years and years ago, but I don't know anyone (except sportspeople and doctors) who automatically list their height and weight in metres and kilos. I think I'm one-fifty-seven - but is that what I weigh or how tall I am? Who knows!

Tommy Vercetti

luckat wrote:

Sweden changed without fuss something like 30 years back.

They had a photo of that in the Irish Times Motoring section last week, look like a lot of fuss in that photo at least!

mike65

No we should'nt. There is no reason to bother and if the UK did'nt do likewise it would be madness on safety grounds.

Mike.

Our man in Havana

Tommy Vercetti wrote:

They had a photo of that in the Irish Times Motoring section last week, look like a lot of fuss in that photo at least!

linkage please

Tommy Vercetti

Bond-007 wrote:

linkage please

uhh it's in my house somewhere :rolleyes:

Tommy Vercetti

here's the picture that they printed of Dagen H (Day of the right)


The changeover is generally accepted to have made driving safer simply because most of the cars there were already LHD models.

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Rules_of_the_road#Sweden

Our man in Havana

Thanks

Seth Brundle

Given that there are political fears about speedos being changed from mph to kph causing negative resale effects, no politician in their right mind would consider this. It would also cost an absolute fortune in new signage, road markings and junction changes, etc. never mind taxi drivers wanting grants for it, bus drivers wanting extra pay for the additional training required...

Alun

luckat wrote:

Sweden changed without fuss something like 30 years back. I figure it'd be safer because of economies of scale - all those Mercs and Volvos and Saabs and Volkses, not to mention Chevys and Chryslers, made to drive on the right. Easier for th'oul tourists to remember which way to look.

But, and it's a big but, that was way back in 1967 when there wasn't the complicated infrastructure of motorways and junctions there are now.

But as jlang points out, it'd be crazy to start driving on the right while we have a quarter of the island driving on the left.

Hing Kong drives on the left, China on the right (in theory!), which makes for an interesting border crossing

Alun

See http://www.brianlucas.ca/roadside/#changing for some interesting anecdotes about other countries that have changed over. Also on the rest of the site there are some interesting statistics about how many countries / cars / potential drivers drive on which side of the road. All we need is for India to undergo a massive economic boom and everyone to own a car and the stats will look very different.

luckat

Oh, good point, Alun, it would be pretty awful to have to remake all the dual-carriageway exits to go off on the right instead of the left!

I think something like 45% of the world drives on the left and 55% on the right at the moment.

Imposter

You also need to factor in the costs of new cars for everyone that currently has one. I can't see anyone who has bought a new (or even newish) car being happy about it having virtually no resale value and the costs they will be faced with in order to get a LHD car.

leeroybrown

Changing to driving on the right would be madness. The only circumstances where we could reasonably consider it would be if the UK were to switch. The cost of re-marking/signing would be huge. Given that 99.9%+ of cars on Irish roads are RHD, a change would mean that practically all Irish driver would be driving 'on the wrong side'. Driving a LHD car can be awkward enough here without factoring in everyone else doing it. Ultimately, the accident rate would increase by an order of magnitude and the road death rate could double (or worse).

Alun

luckat wrote:

I think something like 45% of the world drives on the left and 55% on the right at the moment.

If you look at the site I gave the URL to, there are lots of figures there about this very topic! It all depends on how you measure it, really. The problem is that many of the countries (apart from the UK + Ireland) where they drive on the left are either extremely small islands (usually ex British dependencies of some sort), or large countries with either relatively sparse populations (Australia) or large populations who don't / can't drive (India). So if you're just counting countries, the split you named is about right, but if you start counting population, or number of motor vehicles, you get a very different picture indeed.

Still, it's a useful stat to pull out of the hat when American visitors start complaining that we don't drive on the "right" side of the road like they do

John R

kbannon wrote:

Given that there are political fears about speedos being changed from mph to kph causing negative resale effects, no politician in their right mind would consider this. It would also cost an absolute fortune in new signage, road markings and junction changes, etc. never mind taxi drivers wanting grants for it, bus drivers wanting extra pay for the additional training required...

Every single bus in the country would have to be sold to the UK or scrapped and replaced, either that or let the passengers run the gauntlet of boarding on the wrong side.

luckat

In Sweden they announced the planned change a couple of years before, and after a certain amount of screaming and shouting everyone gradually bought left-hand-drive cars.

(The size of cars people are driving now, mind, they really should be driven from the centre rather than left or right! Reminds me of a bus driver friend years ago who was scolded by a woman for smoking as he drove. "You're not allowed to smoke downstairs," she said. "If you can show me how to drive the bus from upstairs I'll go up so, missus," he said.)

PBC_1966

leeroybrown wrote:

Driving a LHD car can be awkward enough here without factoring in everyone else doing it. Ultimately, the accident rate would increase by an order of magnitude and the road death rate could double (or worse).

I think this issue is blown out of proportion. I went for almost 10 years, 9 of them here in the U.K. without ever setting foot in a RHD car. The only time I've driven in Ireland was also in a LHD car, and being on the opposite side of the vehicle is not the big deal many people believe it to be.

mike65

PBC_1966 wrote:

I think this issue is blown out of proportion. I went for almost 10 years, 9 of them here in the U.K. without ever setting foot in a RHD car. The only time I've driven in Ireland was also in a LHD car, and being on the opposite side of the vehicle is not the big deal many people believe it to be.

I had the worry of watching a German tourist nearly kill himself twice a week or two back as he got stuck behind a large slower vehicle, now if he had sense he'd have fallen back until the view ahead improved but no he kept dodging out to have a look and nearly collected on-comming traffic.

Mike.

PBC_1966

I wouldn't class that as being down to the LHD car though, more the driver's obvious impatience in attempting to pass a vehicle when he clearly couldn't see far enough ahead.

There are some situations (in the U.K./Ireland) where being on the left-hand side of car actually affords a better view of the road ahead of another vehicle as you can keep firmly to the left and see down the left-hand side of the other vehicle.