Level Extreme platform
Subscription
Corporate profile
Products & Services
Support
Legal
Français
Snow
Message
 
 
General information
Forum:
Politics
Category:
Other
Title:
Re: Snow
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01188597
Message ID:
01188783
Views:
24
>>>>>>>>>14 deg C
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Celsius? What's that? You and your crazy metric system.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Mike if u think about it even England switch from the english system to the metric system that everyone uses around the world, I have several American friends that told me that US tried that during the end 70's and 80's, but Americans was just too dumb and didn't want to learn. :-)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>No matter how stupid people are, it's amazing what thay can accomplish. (duck) We have the never-ending jokes between Norwegians and Swedes, you know. The Swedes only have one thing which is better in Sweden than in Norway, namely neighbours. :-)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Around 1970 Sweden shifted from driving on the left side of the road, to the right side. A very big operation, and the joke of course was that they should do the change gradually. and start with the buses and trucks a few days before the private cars .....
>>>>>>
>>>>>>NB! Do you know what they say about driving in England? "Right is wrong, and left is correct." :-))
>>>>>
>>>>>We've talked about this before, it's not just us: India, Australia, NZ, Japan, Malta, parts of Africa (esp. SA), Thailand, et al.
>>>>
>>>>Most of the countriws where they drive on the "wrong" side, are Islands, and thus they have no really good reason to cahnge. But for countries with land norders, they must have special traffic solutions where you can change side.
>>>>
>>>>When Sweden made the change many years ago, it really was an enormous operation. For instance they had to park all the old buses for good, or export them to UK, and buy new ones. All roundabouts had to be redesigned, and all road signs had to be changed. The night they made the change, absolutely all traffic was forbidden for six hours, only ambulances and other emergency traffic was allowed. In fact the change went surprisingly smooth, the first person to be stopped for driving on the wrong side afterwards, was a Norwegian. In Sweden the people had been flooded with information, but they forgot to do the same in the neighbour countries.
>>>
>>>I've just had a deja vu of your doing this before. I remember the stats.
>>>
>>>Then I said it would be prohibitively expensive over here, with our huge road network, esp motorways, where you'd end up with adverse cambers on so many roads and junctions, and to change all the road signs, and arrows painted on the roads, etc, etc. Perhaps, if we were ever going to do it we should have done it back them or earlier. Can you imagine the penalty to commerce to stop all British roads even for a day. And there's NO WAY the conversion would be done in a month, never mind a day!
>>
>>
>>What would be the point in converting? Everyone understands how it works. Some standardization makes sense and some doesn't.
>
>It's only a problem when we take our cars abroad. Overtaking (passing) a big van, for instance, you have to move out quite far before you can see what's coming the other way, AND, of course, get used to driving on the other side. The latter doesn't take very long though, about 5-10 minutes. But when you approach a roundabout - in England go left and give way to traffic from the right or on the roundabout - it takes some thought at first.
>
>It's like having one of those inverting VR helmets on.
>
>Returning home is just a quick flip-flop though.
>
>I expect cars will be generally manufactured with flippable steering wheels and extra pedals soon though.
>
>One other disadvantage: on my wife's Peugot automatic, with RH drive you can't see what mode it's in, in certain positions, cos the display is on the left of the stick, which obscures it. With LH drive that would be no problem.


I never had a problem driving on the left or shifting with the left hand. And roundabouts were fun every time. (OK, I'm weird). The one issue was sometimes clipping the right curb the first few days. I must have been subconsciously judging the car's position like I was still driving on the right. Then when I got back home I would clip right curbs for a while.
Previous
Next
Reply
Map
View

Click here to load this message in the networking platform