> this might be apocryphal, but I heard it was from the design of Conestoga wagons, which were the first to include a brake- and the lever to control the brake was on the left side (since most of us are right handed, and would hold the reins in our right hand) the brake could be controlled with the ‘free hand' (american roads being, at the time, much rougher than old world roads, and more steeply graded--so a brake was needed)
OT:
It seems to me that the rule of the road is established almost as soon as there's traffic, which would have been long before the first Conestoga wagon. Heck, the Romans had chariots; the Egyptians had them even before that. And it wouldn't necessarily be wheeled traffic. When two people meet on a sidewalk here in the US, they each keep to the right. Otherwise, with every encounter there would be a stare-down. Any time one horse and buggy meets another, you have to have either a convention or a confrontation.
One of the stranger things I encountered in a city was in Sydney, where I saw arrows on the sidewalk (but only in one place, not throughout the city) to tell people which side of the sidewalk belonged to those going north and which to those going south, It's been many years, but I seem to recall that they had the same convention, that on a sidewalk you remained to the right.
If Max is right that Napoleon changed the whole continent from left side driving to right side driving, he must have been one powerful dude. Can you imagine what it took to convince literally millions of people to change a life-long habit on the whim of one short little Corsican?
Of Corsican, she replied :)
