https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/F...
That makes it sound like Britain is the only place with left side traffic. 35% of the world population live in countries where they drive on the left side.
one of cool road signs I saw years ago in Ladakh state on road from Manali to Leh. Funnily enough that 19h minibus trip sometimes went through valleys without any form of road, just used least uneven path. Not so funnily enough we had an obvious technical stop later when driver was banging with huge rock on some part of suspension for an hour, and luckily his caveman engineering worked well enough to get us moving again
In fact driving in central london is a unique skill that I unwittingly mastered as I learnt to drive in zone one.
This means that I can out manoeuvrer a pissed off white van man in a hurry. Its like chess but more angry and slightly slower.
For example: https://www.regulations.gov/document/NIST-2019-0003-0001
> After December 31, 2022, any data derived from or published as a result of surveying, mapping, or any other activity within the U.S. that is expressed in terms of feet shall only be based on the “foot” equal to 0.3048 meter (exactly), formerly known as the “international foot” in the 1959 Federal Register notice.
Metric has made almost no inroads at all in anyone's daily life here.
Plus everyone would then be driving cars with the steering wheel on the wrong side for decades until the whole fleet got eventually replaced.
Countries have done it before, but I think there's a reason not many countries have done it since the mid 20th century when roads and cars were a lot simpler and there were fewer of them.
Switching to metric could be done gradually - replacing existing signs with metric ones only when they wear out, building new systems in metric while still using US units for the old ones.
There's no way to gradually switch from LHT to RHT, you have to somehow do a switchover in a day
However this is not an argument in favour of 20th century style, non-autonomous individual vehicles as the main transit solution. There are safer and better ways. Autonomous Vehicles will hopefully play a role in that.
You could do it in phases. Have the trucks switch over on Monday, buses on Tuesday ...
As a complete aside, 1 country has done this: Sweden on 3 September 1967 and "It was by far the largest logistical event in Sweden's history"
It also sounds completely plausible that a binary choice like left hand or right hand driving can be switched in a way that drives a pressure campaign that nations will give into China on because it’s an easier short term choice and wouldn’t gain an immediate reaction to due to the enormous cost that would be rapidly felt.
Mail carriers in the USA also have their wheel on the other side so they can reach people's mailboxes easily.
PS Your 240V electric grid works that way because when the US switched to 120V (in like 1900 or so), we sold all our old gear to you and you never switched. So now all your electric things cost more as a result and your electrical outlets will kill you. So your decision making on such things is suspect.
metric is only for science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempst...
It has a bad rep, but if you're used to British mini roundabouts, driving on it is a non-event. The regularity actually means it's simpler than other, smaller, but more arbitrary aggregations of mini-roundabouts.
If it's so good why aren't there more of them? Not like England has any shortage of N-way (where N >4) intersections they could be used at.
The wikipedia page says "the roundabout provides a better throughput of traffic than other designs and has an excellent safety record, since traffic moves too slowly to do serious damage in the event of a collision" which to me sounds a lot like someone trying to spin failure to play up the silver lining.
Experimentation with junction design has been a good thing in the UK. Many of the designs are, however, attempts to do as well as possible in the space, because a better design would require compulsorily purchasing some people's houses or gardens. So, although there are not lots of magic roundabouts, there are lots of agglomerations of mini-roundabouts with slightly different topology , many of which are more annoying (but fit in the space, and keep traffic flowing).
However, it does seem likely that this is kept mainly because of its fame. I seem to recall that there was a proposal to replace it which was shouted down.
There's another very similar but smaller one at Heathrow, next to the Hatton Cross tube station. That one has the added attraction of London taxis and Ubers traversing it at high speed.
Recently I discussed with some friends the relative merits of LHT and RHT, and we came to the conclusion that LFT was better because you could drive and shoot with your right hand. So LHT is great for drive-by-shootings. Curiously, no alcohol was ingested during this conversation.