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Why we drive on a certain side of the road is my favorite piece of trivia, cuz it's something no one really knows and it makes me feel all smarty.


Centuries ago when the only way to get places was on foot or horseback, people needed weapons for protection against robbers and such. So if you're meeting someone coming at you on the road, you'd want them to be on the side of your weapon. For most people that was their right hand, so you'd want traffic coming at you on the right, so you'd move on the left side of the road. For horse-drawn cargo trucks it was the same principle; you'd want to sit on the right side of the carriage, so your lash wouldn't catch on the back of the carriage, and then you'd want traffic passing on the right so if the road was narrow you could visually make sure your wheels didn't catch on the other guys'.

In America, for some reason most of their trucks didn't have seats on the carriage, so the driver had to sit up in the front on one of the horses (sucks to be that horse, pulling cargo and having a drunken Bostonian sitting on your back). They took to the custom of sitting on one of the left horses so that they could whip in the middle. So naturally to make sure you didn't get entangled in oncoming traffic you'd want that traffic passing on the left. So Americans started driving on the right. France adopted this custom for the same reason, and Napoleon spread it across Europe. The British Empire, meanwhile, liked its keep-left tradition just fine, and adopted it in all its colonies, where it remains in a lot of them today.