[drivingpairs] Fw: sitting on the right,
- From: "Jay Hubert" <jhubert@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Pairs List" <drivingpairs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 16:05:14 -0700
For those of you NOT on CD-L, Lyles discussion is pretty much the way I was
told,
also, but with a few enhancements. Remember that in medieval times and well into
the renaissance, left handedness was the mark of the devil according to majority
opinion, so EVERYBODY was right handed, like it or not! <VBG> Picture driving
a
heavy coach along the narrow, but highly developed roads in early England,
sitting
on the right, to free up the whip, driving on the LEFT for the clearance issues
Lyle noted, plus not getting the whip tangled in the bushes.
FWIW
Jay
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lyle Petersen" <hufbutcher@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <CD-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 6:08 AM
Subject: Re: sitting on the right,
I'm pretty sure that the crchives have a lot of material about why we sit on
the right, but to save that lookup job, here is a brief summary: since 9
out of 10 of us are right-handed, we use our right hand to carry and use the
whip. If you have a passenger, it's inconvenient and uncomfortable to use
the whip with the right hand if the passenger is on our right. As soon as
whip-wielding drivers with passengers figured this out, it became the norm
quite naturally. And given that arrangement, driving on the left side of
the road was a natural, since it made it easier to judge passing clearance.
On early American highways, i. e. the corduroy roads of Pennsylvania and
other westbound routes, the heavy traffic was freight wagons which were
driven by a rider who sat on the left horse of a team, again because of
being right-handed. The hub-to-hub clearance issue was then best resolved
by driving on the right side of the road. Then, as now, tonnage had the
right of way.
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