Why do we keep left while others keep right?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
07 July 2013
In
An interesting explanation is given by
Historian-cum-Management-Consultant-cum-comedian Cyril Northcote
Parkinson in his hilarious and thought-provoking book - “Parkinson’s Law; the Pursuit of Progress”. In this 1958 publication,
Parkinson says that the keep-left idea was taken from the days of
horse-back riding.
If you are right handed, you mount onto a horse by stepping on the
stirrup with your right foot. Then you swing the left leg over the horse
and you land on its back. Now, if you mounted from the left hand side of
the animal, you’d end up face backwards! [Close your eyes and visualise
that]
So to land properly facing forward, the right-handed rider must approach
the animal from the right-hand-side. Thus when the first cars were
built, they were designed in a way that the driver enters from the right
side; so it made sense that the driver’s seat was also on the right of
the vehicle.
Now with the driver on the right, the safest way to look out for
oncoming vehicles before overtaking is when everybody drives on the
left. This was the reason advanced when
Disclaimer: I don’t know whether Parkinson’s explanation is historically
accurate.
But when you observe cars at a roundabout, another consequence of
keeping left becomes apparent: the flow is in a clockwise manner. To the
right-handed human, this looks very natural.
Clockwise rotation means that the top the circle moves from left to
right and this is the same direction in which we write.
But why do we write that way? The answer to that becomes obvious when
you see a left-handed person writing with a fountain pen. They have to
loop their arm around the paper in order to avoid smearing the wet ink.
If we wrote from right to left, 89 per cent of people would have to do
it in that awkward posture… perhaps we’d have gotten used to it. I
suspect that those cultures of the world who write right to left did not
develop fountain pens during their civilisation.
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