Driving on the Other Side

I just realised that I’ve been driving a year longer in cars with right hand controls than with the wheel on the left. I’ve never had much of a problem switching back and forth between the two arrangements. When I drove a rented car in England for the first time, everything was okay except that I had a tendency to look up and to the right for the central rear-view mirror. That issue went away a long time ago.

Sometimes I wonder if there is any aspect of the arrangement of controls in a car that’s inherently better than the other. The only thing I’ve come up with is that, as the majority of drivers are right handed, maybe it’s better to use the left hand on the gear shift and keep the right one free to steer, but I’m not too sure about that theory.

However, it is a bit stranger to drive a right hand control car in a country that drives on the right or left on left, if you see what I mean. Susan and I drive to Belgium three or four times a year to visit friends and relatives. Everything’s fine driving down to the Euro-tunnel or the Dover ferry docks. But, diving out into France we’re now on the wrong side of the car or the road, depending on your point-of-view. Surprisingly, this isn’t too bad. The only real issue is passing other cars and trucks when you can’t see around them from the driver’s side. On the Freeway/AutoRoute/ Motorway/Autobahn (FAMA), where there’s plenty of room and the traffic is divided, even this isn’t very taxing. In towns and cities a lot of the streets are one-way so that’s pretty easy as well.

For a few years, we had a Fiat Spider that I’d bought in the States and dragged around a few countries. This model was never made in a right hand control version. So we drove around Warwickshire, where we lived, on the wrong side. Now, this was a little more challenging. In those days, there weren’t any FAMA’s in Warwickshire and the main towns, Stratford, Leamington, Warwick, don’t have very many one-way streets. So, the whole county was pretty much a no-passing zone for us.

So I’ve concluded that switching sides of the road and sides of the car just isn’t a very big deal most of the time.