All this talk of motor vehicles... I've been having the slightly surreal experience of learning to drive on the wrong side of the road. Granted, the roads here are in +superb+ condition, but everyone drives like they have some lower limb condition that prevents them from taking the weight off the right pedal. There's not so much of the crazy weaving and cutting in and tailgating (not as much as, apparently, in the UAE), it's just that they drive really, really fast. And then some. I have been doing very well (manual car, too), mainly because I'm reasonably ambidextrous, and I'm a spatial thinker, so turning things back to front in my mind (or contorting them in some other way) as required is pretty easy. The only thing I've noticed is an unconscious drifting to the right within the lane, which I find rather puzzling.

And for bizarre traffic, just one word: India

[flerdle] The drift to the right is to be expected. You are used to driving a right-hand drive car, which means you are used to most of the car being to the left of you (equivalently, you, as an individual, are used to being on the right side of the traffic lane). Now most of the car is to your right, which means if you place yourself (your body) in the position in the lane that you are used to, the car will be too far to the right. As someone whose driven pretty extensively on both sides of the road, I actually find this is the biggest problem of adjustment -- more than actually making the mistake of turning onto the wrong side.

But you should take care in the next week or so: the dangerous time for accidentally driving on the wrong side is typically after a few days, when you stop thinking so consciously about which side of the road you should be on.

[nik] er, I think Bm was _kidding_; and I think (hope) that Raak and st d knew that.

[Breadmaster] There is a small country in which that is actually the case. I am pretty sure it's Kiribati. I remember reading they brought in a zero tolerance policy around 2000, and have since banned about half their drivers, without much effect on the economy, so I gather.

There's no reason to think it would have a major impact on the economy. In most economies the transportation sector is a pretty small fraction of GDP, and other forms of transportation typically operate as effective substitutes for private vehicles. Plus the revenue that would have gone to the transportation sector ends up being spent elsewhere, so on net the effects are going to be minimal. In fact, the impact could be positive, in that there may be stronger multiplier effects in the tradeable sectors of the economy (which is where at least some of the spending will go), and the policy would also eliminate some of the uncompensated costs, such as pollution and congestion ("externalities" in economists' lingo), from cars. Thus I might actually expect to see improvements in the balance of trade, little impact on tax revenues (and hence on the government budget deficit), and a positive (though probably negligible) effect on growth rates. Of course, this analysis presumes that the monetary authority pursues an apprpriate interest rate policy to ensure that the impact on the financial sector is minimized.

[Projoy] As Kiribati consists of groups of archipelagos spread over about half the Pacific Ocean, and none of the islands are very big, this means that (a) you can't drive any particularly useful distance in the first place, and (b) air and sea travel is much much more important.
Banning half the drivers in Britain may seem like a good idea to some (e.g. Richard Brunstrom, chief constable of Mrs Trellis' neck of the woods (N Wales)), but taking (say) half the HGVs off the roads would place an intolerable strain on the rail infrastructure, which, in any case, leaves far too many places unserved. OR you double the number of aircraft plying our domestic skies - and you'll know how much stick air travel comes in for for its alleged impact on pollution levels.