In Continuum.

Is left, right?

Or is right, left?

Is right, right?

*

Ladies and gentleman. 

I'd like to begin my speech by telling you how my father almost died last year. So, my father was in the car with my mother, driving out from my estate and came to a traffic junction. He wanted to turn right to go somewhere, and he waited patiently for the light to turn green. Minutes passed, and the red light finally gave way to the green, and it was finally his turn to make the right. He turned the steering wheel, the car turned, and that was when he came face to face with the oncoming traffic, right in his face. He was a meter or two away from death, simply because he made the wrong turn and turned into the wrong lane at the junction. The reason being is that my father is a businessman, and he travels around different countries on a regular basis, which was also why he got a little bit confused as to which lane to turn to. He turned to the right lane that day, when he really should have turned to the left one, like any other cars in a previously colonized country by the British. Yet, having driven in countries like China and Taiwan, my father wasn't exactly in the correct frame of mind to make that kind of judgment. So, my father survived the ordeal and came home to tell us all about it. One question that he asked, though, was this - why do some countries drive on the right, and some countries drive on the left? Can't we all make nice and, drive on the same side of the road? 

[I shall sidetrack a little bit here. You know how it is with a lot of standard speeches from school. The lecturer, Bob, wanted us to give the thesis statement, to preview some points, to tell the audience why the topic is important to them. I don't really think I need, or want, to go into that on my blog. I mean, in truth, it really isn't something that is going to change your life forever. It's just something that is interesting to know, I suppose, and I stated why it is important during the speech just to make the requirement. So let's just skip that part of the presentation and move on to the real juicy bits. Or, at least, they are juicy to me.]

To begin, let's begin with the initial direction of choice - left. It began with the Romans who wanted to start with the left, though there aren't many solid evidences to prove that. Archaeologists have found coins from the Roman empire that depicted riders riding on the left hand side of the road on their horses. Another famous archaeologist also suggested that Romans rode on the left hand side of the road, because of a quarry that he found in England that used to belong to the Roman empire. This road have deep tracks in the ground, supposedly dating back to the Roman times, and the tracks on one side of the road is deeper than the other. The left hand side of the road had deeper tracks, while the other side relatively shallower for some reason. This archaeologist believed that the left side of the road was the direction the Romans chose, because of a temple that they were building in the quarry at that point in time. Rocks were being transported to this temple from faraway places, which makes the wagons heavier with load. So, heavier wagons led to deeper tracks on the road, and that was how he deduced that the left hand side was the direction that the Roman rode.

Yet, the Romans didn't really care too much about which side of the rode other conquered territories rode on. After all, they were never history's greatest megalomaniac to begin with. Whilst it was the Romans that started the trend, it was the British that really promoted the idea of left hand drive (or ride), because everybody used the English System. It was supposed to be the proper way to do things, the more civilized way to do everything. The British wanted to ride on the left because they are very paranoid people - here's why. Most of us are right handed now, and that was the same during the medieval times. Most people were right handed, and they kept their swords to the left when they rode horses. So, imagine yourself as this British dude in the medieval times, riding on the left hand side of the road as you see another dude coming around the corner. He has a helmet on his head, so you don't really know whether he is a friend or a foe. If he is a friend, then everything is fine. But if he is a foe, then he might want to stab you. The thing is that you want to stab your enemies first, and that was exactly why the British preferred to be on the left. It is just easier, or smoother, to draw your sword and stab your enemies if you rode on the left instead of the right. Try doing pulling an invisible sword out of your invisible scabbard right now, and try to stab to both directions. Stabbing to the right while being on the left is just much easier, right? 

That tradition of driving on the left lasted only so long though, because the Americans and the French decided to come in and mess up everything. They have their own legitimate reasons to ride on a different side of the road though, and the explanation would need a little bit of visualization if you don't mind. So, back in those days, they had a lot of horse-drawn wagons, and these wagons were never built with a rider's seat. So what the riders did back then was to side on the left rear horse, because they wanted to keep their right hand free to control the other horses. And because he was seated on the left rear horse, the riders wanted the oncoming traffic to pass on their side of the wagon - left - because it was the only way to keep a safety distance between the two vehicles. The only way for that to happen was if everybody rode on the right hand side of the road, passing each other on their left, and that was the reason why the Americans and French rode on different sides. Yet, from what I've gathered, Americans and French just don't like the British very much. Anything that the British people did, they just wanted to be a little different for some reason. Rugby became American Football, and "football" is called "soccer" for some reason. Not to mention the dropping of the letter "U", and strange pronunciation of "herbs" without the "H" in America. 

So, the Americans and the French wanted everything to be different, and they were. The metric system was actually developed by the French in the late 1700s. I think it was an act of defiance against the British, because they wanted to measure things a little differently. The millimeters and the centimeters, the meters and the kilometers, all of those had to be replaced by the inches, the feet, the yards and the miles. The Americans thought that it'd be a cool idea to measure everything by the length of their feet, and they followed suit. Yet, only a handful of countries in the world still uses the metric system now, and even the French realized that it is a stupid idea. Then there are other measurements within the metric system that almost seems as if they were designed to be different from the British. The grams, the kilograms, and the tonnes got replaced by the ounces, the pounds, and the metric tons. Everything got really confused, which is why we ended up with conversion tables everywhere, and changing it would be too great a task right now. So, as you can see, the Americans and the French have been trying to be different from the British ever since they first started to hate each other, which was probably when Napoleon came around. 

Napoleon was a megalomaniac, because everything has to be according to his wishes. So he went around Europe and conquered a whole bunch of countries, and his journey led him to many countries that rode on the left. So, along with the French flags that Napoleon brought along with him to stuck in the grounds of every conquered country, he wanted all of those countries to also ride on the left - because that's what the French were doing. I suppose it just made things easier for him, you know, to get used to the new country. So that was what he did with every country that he conquered, and that was also what the British people did. The left-hand riding countries were soon being taken over by the French and the Americans, and they sure didn't like it very much. That was also how colonization brought along, amongst other things, left hand drive. This massive confusion lasted all the way until the early 1900s when cars, or auto-mobiles, were created. People didn't really know whether to put the steering wheel on the left, the middle, or the right hand side of the car. It was really until about the 1910s, when Ford came out with the T-Model that standardized everything in America. 

There was the British who started with the trend, the Americans and the French who didn't want to conform, and all the other countries who were kinda forced into adopting a direction somehow. Singapore, as we know, was stumbled upon by Sir Stanford Raffles in 1819. That was the beginning of our colonization, along with a bunch of other countries in the world who were ever colonized. One thing about being colonized is that you have to accept the customs of the colonizing country, whether you like it or not. As if it isn't bad enough that we have to toil in their oil palm planation, we had to drink a kind of tea we didn't necessarily like (high tea), we had to play a kind of sport we didn't necessarily understand (who in the world understands cricket, really?), and some of us even had to put little Union Jacks in their flags, like New Zealand, Australia, Bermudas, and the Fiji Islands. Driving on the left was something that the British people insisted upon the locals, and that is why ninety percent of all the left-hand driving countries in the world were, for a period of time, colonized by the British. Japan is a little different though, because Japan had samurais. 

Well, samurais really liked to kill people. It isn't really in their interest, but they were in that line of work to kill people anyway. So, you really want to kill people swiftly, and they decided that the left hand side of the road would be much better as well, since they thought it'd be easier to draw their swords. Yes, very much like the British, they really wanted to kill people as fast as possible. Besides, when Japan eventually opened up to the West, the British were the ones who helped to design their railway systems and stuff, and that was how the entirely motor vehicle history was born out of. People in Japan started driving on the left, and that remains until this day when you visit the country. Japan was never colonized by any country, but they colonized a lot of other countries. They killed a lot of people, pillaged a lot of villages, and murdered babies during World War 2. Yet, I don't think they ever forced any countries to change to the left hand drive. It's probably because they didn't really see the need to change something so trivial. I suppose different people have different priorities, and Napoleon just had too much time on his hands. Who knows, French Fries probably became popular because of him too. 

So, the ultimate question is this: is there a right side of the road? Is the left, right? Or is the right, left? Or is the right, right? Is the right wrong, or is the right right? Is the left wrong or... well, basically, is there a correct side of the road to drive on? The answer is no, because every country has a legitimate reason to drive on their side of the road. It really is no mystery when it comes to international borders, because you really don't get an epic mess of cars driving on different sides of the roads. More often than not, you are probably going to find a sign like the picture above, pointing you to the right side of the road. Like, when you are traveling from China to Hong Kong, that is probably all you're gonna get as a warning. We can co-exist, I suppose, like animals and human beings, if we could only be careful of the balance. My father still has troubles differentiating the left to the right, and the right to the left. But he is working on it, really, he is working on it.