Motorcycling: Driving on the Right

For once, I am going to explain the difference between right and left without getting into politics.

I was sitting in the Doctor's office reading MacLean's again, and I saw an article about Samoa switching sides of the road. In the article, it mentioned this was the first time in 39 years since a country had switched driving from one side to the other. They did not mention the previous country, but I was in Sierra Leone in 1971, when they switched from the left to the right hand side. (Samoa is going right to left). Nigeria switched even more recently, in 1972.

Unlike Samoa, there was no controversy in Sierra Leone. Everyone knew our neighboring counties drove on the right, as did almost all West Africa. If the switch was not done soon, it would have to be done eventually at far greater cost. Thinking back, it seems so nostalgic that people could make a decision based on rational thought and foresight, unlike the decisions we make today about global warming (or anything else you can think of). It was thought to be responsible to make a relatively small sacrifice now rather than let future generations suffer a far greater burden.

There would have been plenty of chances for opponents of right hand traffic to recall that Hitler ordered right-hand traffic in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the 1930s. But back in those days, Hitler comparisons were not a popular debating game.

Coming from Canada, I had learned to drive on the right all my life, but switching to driving on the left in Sierra Leone was not too difficult. Motorcycles have an advantage over cars in that you don't need to move the steering wheel from one side to the other, they are equally at home on either side of the street. And if you see a vehicle approaching on the wrong side, you may still be able to find space on your side to squeeze by. If you have to make the last minute decision to swerve to the wrong side, you will sometimes find that the other driver does the same, and you're finished.

Sierra Leone did the change in the middle of the night and declared a 4 hour moratorium on driving. Of course, my motorcycle ended up on the road during that time. I had lent it to my housemate for the night, and he didn't return until after the moratorium started. I was a bit concerned, but as he said, it was actually the only time he had ever really been safe on the roads, so all was forgiven.

Funny thing was, the next few days I had a really hard time adjusting to driving my motorcycle on the right side of the road. I guess it was easy enough to switch when on unfamiliar roads, but hard to change once you adopt certain habits.

Everyone was expecting carnage on the roads during the next few weeks, but as far as I could tell, there were few or even maybe no accidents. I certainly never met anyone on the wrong side of the road although I was over on the left a few times by mistake.