In reply to:
Someone, somewhere, had to have made a conscious decision to follow the Continental rule rather than the Insular rule. Was it a matter of throwing away a rule just to be able to do so? Or was there another equally good reason? Since the American aborigines didn't have the wheel they would have had to deal only with one walker meeting another. Did our first "invaders" adopt the existing convention? Did the existing convention change from place to place?
The Canadian columnist Gwynne Dyer (author of the excellent War) wrote a column on this very issue once. I tried finding it on the Web the last time this came up here, but failed. The gist of his column was this:
Archaeological evidence strongly suggests that driving on the left was the norm for millennia. It was definitely the Roman tradition. The evidence consists of things like wheel ruts and other indicators of traffic flow. Also, as most people are right-handed, driving on the left made sense for purposes of defending oneself from oncoming traffic, should it prove hostile. Dwyer wrote that everybody's favourite Corsican deliberately changed the rule from left to right, in order to leave his mark on Europe. That is the extent of my clear recall of the article. However, I have a vague and uncertain recollection of reading in it that the then nascent US adopted Napoléon's change for the same sort of reasons that Webster arbitrarily imposed his very "non-u" orthography. It was another opportunity to demonstrate how xompletely the ties with the former colonial oppresor had been broken. That, and the large influx of immigrants from Continental Europe.
I am determined to try to track down the article in question, if only for my own peace of mind.
