[Tagging] Driving side

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 3:24 PM, Fernando Trebien <
fernando.trebien at gmail.com> wrote:

> A change of driver
> side requires either a change of vehicle or some special vehicle that
> can drive on both sides. In the case of your city, driving side
> changes, but driver side doesn't. You could include that in the
> description of "opposite".
>

I wish this urban legend would die already, because I know of no place on
the planet this is actually true.  If this were actually true, the US
Postal Service would have all of 3 vehicles in their multimillion-vehicle
fleet with the steering wheel on the "legal" side, and an ever growing
population of kei cars imported from Japan registered in Oklahoma would be
"banned" (they are in most states because Japan's domestic vehicles don't
meet crash standards in most states, whereas Oklahoma places a stronger
emphasis on driver ability than vehicle crash-worthiness than most states).
The seating position of the driver is merely a feature of convenience and
largely up to driver preference.  Most drivers prefer left hand drive in
keep-right countries, and right hand drive in keep-left countries because
it greatly increases visibility when overtaking.  Having driven RHS
vehicles in North America, I can safely say it's not impossible, but you
have to really increase your run-up length to pass safely just because of
the sightline when looking to overtake.  Drivers who have to reach for
curbside objects a lot tend to prefer RHS vehicles because they don't have
to step in traffic or reach across the vehicle to, say, collect garbage,
deliver mail, restripe a curb, deliver a package, etc.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20140321/ec002236/attachment.html>