"Niklas Karlsson" wrote in message
...
Mark Brader wrote on Sun, 09 Jan 2005 04:44:21 -0000:
John Rowland:
Nearly all London squares have a clockwise one-way system, even though
when
all of the roads in and out of the square are one-way, an anti-clockwise
one-way system is superior (because drivers have better visibility when
curving to the left). ...

Perhaps this was done in preparation for a changeover to driving on the
right. After all, now that Britain is part of the EU...

Sweden had left-hand driving until September 3, 1967.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

The costs of doing this in the UK today would be prohibitive, both to
highway departments and to private individuals: every road junction would
need to have its white lines repainted on the other side; motorway junctions
and roundabouts would need their entry and exit roads re-aligning (assuming
that entry and exit roads are curved differently - maybe this isn't the
case); every car would need to scrapped and replaced with an LHD car.

It is probably this last point that is the biggest problem: in Sweden, "most
cars were LHD imports" according to the Wikipedia article (what about all
the home-produced Volvos?) and there were far fewer cars on the road,
whereas in Britain there are nowadays many more cars etc so the replacement
cost is far greater. I certainly wouldn't contemplate driving an RHD on the
right-hand side of the road because of the visibilty problems when
overtaking or pulling out obliquely from a motorway slip-road.

It is to be hoped that if we ever *do* change to driving on the right, we
don't adopt the Dutch and German rule of traffic joining a roundabout having
priority over traffic already on the roundabout. If everything about UK
driving at present is merely reversed (including roundabouts becoming
anti-clockwise) things will be a lot easier than if rules of priority are
altered at the same time. I understand (though I can't quote a source for
this) that Brussels has tried (and failed) to make the UK change to the
Dutch/German rule on roundabout priority.

And let's hope we don't ever succumb to the American rule of allowing
overtaking on the driver's blind side (ie his left in an RHD car). That, and
four-way stop junctions, were the only part of driving in America that
scared me ****less.