Why Americans Drive on the Right

Every day, billions of people climb into a car and pull out into traffic - automatically, without thinking, on whichever side of the road their country has always used. But which side, and why, is one of the most revealing questions in modern history. Why do Americans drive on the right while the British drive on the left? Why does the left-hand world map almost perfectly onto the former British Empire, and the right-hand world onto the reach of Napoleon's conquests? And why, centuries after the decisions were made, is the world still living with them? This book tells the full story of the world's most invisible divide. It begins with Roman soldiers marching in armed groups on the roads of a vast empire, and moves through medieval knights, French revolutionaries, American teamsters, and a small Scandinavian country that switched sides overnight in 1967 - with military precision and a brief, paradoxical drop in accident rates. Along the way it asks what the side of the road a country drives on reveals about that country's history, its geography, and the forces that shaped it. Drawing on two thousand years of history across four continents, and told with the narrative drive of the best popular history, Why Americans Drive on the Right is a book about how decisions get made - and how, more often than not, they simply persist. Outlasting the people who made them, the reasons those people had, and sometimes the civilizations they belonged to. History hides in plain sight. On every road in the world, it is hiding in which lane you are in.

Pagina's: 42, Paperback, Independently published