The Policy Arguments for and Against Driving on the Right Side of the Road
Generations of law professors have always insisted that there is some class of rules where the particular content of the law is less important than that we have some clear answer to a question. The paradigmatic example is a rule specifying which side of the road one ought to drive on. The decision, so the argument goes, is entirely arbitrary so long as we all pick a side.
Not so it would seem.
The country of Samoa (not to be confused with the U.S. territory American Samoa) is about the switch from driving on the right side of the road to driving on the left side of the road, reports the WSJ. Somoa is much closer to New Zealand and Australia than to the United States. Apparently over 100,000 Samoan expats live in both countries and they want to be able to send their old cars home to relatives in the islands. By switching sides, the government hopes to facilitate the flow of cheaper, hand-me-down cars into the country. Interestingly, however, the article argues that the original American choice to drive on the right hand side was not as arbitrary as the law profs would have us believe:
American drivers of horse-drawn carriages tended to ride their horses, or walk alongside them, on the left-hand side of their vehicles so they could wield whips with their right hands. That made it necessary to lead carriages down the right side of the road so drivers could be nearer the center of the street.
The article doesn’t explain why it is that the Brits opted for the left hand side. Maybe they are all left handed, or perhaps they learned to use a whip with their right hand as part of some sort of public school hazing ritual. Isn’t there something in a Dickens novel about that?
Perhaps one can always find policy rationales for the substantive content of rules after all.
(ht: Moin Yahya of the University of Alberta Law School)