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Högertrafikomläggningen
- mg 2y agoMaybe the world should standardize on: Driving on the right Speaking English The metric system The 2024-06-09 date format The Celsius scale The 24-hour clock
- SahAssar 2y ago> Speaking English If you mean teaching english as a second language, I can agree. If you mean switching over to it as the primary language I hard disagree.
- checkyoursudo 2y agoI am fluent in one language and speak three others passably, and have order-a-beer/ask-for-a-toilet/get-directions ability in a few others. It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? The one I am fluent in is not the language of any of my ancestors if I go back just a couple of generations. So what? My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language. Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
- Novosell 2y agoAre you trying to make a point or..? It's a bit unclear. People can have multiple languages they're native in, that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English.
- checkyoursudo 2y ago> that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English Where did I say that everyone should speak only English? I do not care what language people speak. > Are you trying to make a point or..? Why are you being unkind? Or hostile, or whatever this is? I was asking a question. I understand that people think they will lose something if they speak a different language. My native language is not the same as any of my ancestors from just a few generations ago, and I want to know what difference it makes?
- Novosell 2y agoLanguage and culture go hand in hand. I don't understand how you've learnt 1 fluently and 3 passably and are deemingly completely missing this aspect to it. So to standardize language is to attempt to standardize culture which I would imagine we don't wanna do, right? And it doesn't matter what your ancestors spoke, of course. But it does matter what those around you speak, now. Neither the person you originally responded to or me have mentioned ancestors.
- tsimionescu 2y agoSpeaking a different language than your great great great grandfather ("a few generations ago") is not always very impactful, though even this means you can no longer read letters or poetry or novels that they may have written or just loved. You can no longer understand laws that they might have obeyed, understand speeches that influenced them, and so many other things that keep a culture going beyond generations. However, that pales in comparison to what the transition means, not speaking the same language as your grandparents. You get a huge gulf of distance from relatives who, for the majority of humanity, are some of their most beloved and close relationships.
- SahAssar 2y agoUsually people have one primary language which is usually the one predominantly used in the home they grew up in (or maybe the one used for their primary education). If you have multiple, that's fine, but your disregarding the reality for 90%+ of people if you don't think most people have a language that is their "primary". > It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? For most people language is tied to their culture and history. I'm just saying that we should not mandate that people use a certain language as their "primary". It would be nice if we had a global way to passably communicate though.
- checkyoursudo 2y agoYeah, I get what you are saying. I would never want to mandate any language. I think it is dumb when countries have official languages as opposed to e.g. operating languages. I just think that people are more worried about the homogenization of language than they need to be. In fact, with how quickly culture is homogenizing around the world, I think that it is even possible that language differences outlast cultural differences over the medium term. Teenagers in a lot of the world I have been to in the past years dress/behave/express themselves ... not very differently. Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
- SahAssar 2y ago> Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway. That seems like a very reductive take. Of course trends and culture is more global since we now communicate globally, but there are definitely regional cultures and values and those are expressed many different ways. If I travel from my small european city to a city in the american midwest or a city in nigeria that are going to be massive differences regardless if the teens are doing the same tiktok dance or whatever metric of homogenization you pick. But in all of those places I almost everyone I will meet can speak english.
- andoando 2y agoI imagine having offical languages dictates that all the state functions have to operate in said official languages. If you have a government office for example, your website, pamphlets, administered tests etc for example have to be printed in the official language. Would be a mess if that was not enforced
- qwertox 2y ago> as a second language It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
- SahAssar 2y agoI think that if it were to become a official second language that would be a natural second step, if nothing else just for efficiency in regions that currently have multiple languages.
- cupofjoakim 2y agoI can agree on all of the points except "Speaking English". The way things are going it's going to be either that or mandarin regardless, but there's so much culture in language that IMO it'd be a shame to hurry it up.
- mg 2y agoI don't know enough about Mandarin to have an opinion on it. The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
- toxik 2y agoWriting Mandarin with pinyin is way easier, you just type the first letter of each sound in a sentence. “I like to eat ice cream” is 我喜歡吃冰淇淋, written entirely by the letter sequence wxhcbql.
- mmmrk 2y agoEnglish is more likely than Mandarin, because lots of people (including the mainland Chinese working in sectors that interface with the outside world) can speak some English, but very few people outside China speak any Mandarin. Nassim Taleb wrote about this in https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
- triyambakam 2y agoNo daylight savings time ...would be one that I would add.
- usr1106 2y agoMaybe all should use Beijing time, Moscow time, or UTC? Seriously, I think the planet has bigger problems than discussing about DST.
- elaus 2y agoFound the German. On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
- noduerme 2y agoHow would one timezone work? The sun sets at 8:00 in one place and sets at 20:00 on the other side of the world? In terms of working or traveling between time zones, it seem like it would be much harder to remember the fact that, for instance, people in New York stop work when the clock says 17:00 and people in LA work until 20:00, than to remember that they are three time zones apart.
- usrusr 2y agoIIRC the more serious proposals for a global time scheme deliberately abandon the old 24:60:60 so that daylight expectations, locally as they would be, would have to be re-learned anyways. Up to that point that doesn't sound that bad to me. But where i don't see any chance is durations, how many seconds/minutes/hours. I suspect that a change to duration units would be even harder to adapt to than metrification of lengths.
- teddyh 2y agoSo You Want To Abolish Time Zones <https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish>
- purple-leafy 2y ago> Driving on the right No thanks > 2024-06-09 date format That doesnt infer what you want. Are you saying you want YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM
- geysersam 2y agoThey want YYYY-MM-DD
- codetrotter 2y agoLook at what date it is today, and then try to guess which one of these format is the one they are referring to. Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
- purple-leafy 2y agoDon’t Americans do: MM-DD-YYYY? So it would stand to reason that an American commenter may be meaning YYYY-DD-MM And guessing based on todays date, tell that to commenters who check this post in 6 months
- adastra22 2y agoAmericans do mm/dd/yyyy, but never mm-dd-yyyy
- xjay 2y agoUnderscore as a separator, YYYY_MM_DD: 1970_01_01 2024_06_09 2024_12_31 16383_12_31 Treated as base-10 number literal in some programming languages. 5 bits for DD [0, 31] + 4 bits for MM [0, 15] + 14 or more bits for year [0, 16_383] = 23 bits.
- yokoprime 2y agoNobody ever should write YYYY-DD-MM, its the worst of both worlds with the structure being both in a non-logical order AND not conforming to how dates are pronounced.
- constantcrying 2y ago>Speaking English Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications. Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
- falcor84 2y agoMy understanding was that the parent recommends standardizing the native language throughout the world, rather than enforcing ESL.
- constantcrying 2y agoSure, but how would I teach my children English as a first language, when my English is only ESL. And even if I could, I would never do that, as a diversity in languages directly leads to a diversity in thought.
- graemep 2y agoI agree about diversity in languages being a good thing. I also see minor languages gradually dying out. First languages do change with time so it does happen, and it can be induced to happen. My grandparents all spoke English as a first language, but if you go back a few more generations only one of my great (or possibly great great) grandparents ancestors would have done.
- falcor84 2y agoDiversity in thought is great, but I don't think that distinct native languages are a prerequisite for that. Throughout history, the societies that were able to achieve the greatest accomplishments, according to most any measure, are those with the most people using the same language.
- encom 2y ago>clarity of communications I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting. In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
- wood_spirit 2y agoGreat list! Let’s add Euros and universal health care too!
- bjoli 2y agoThe euro was great for Germany. Others weren't that happy.
- netsharc 2y agoYour comment is grey because people are downvoting you. But you're right, and it makes me think HN has more ignoramus than curious hackers... It's economics: https://seekingalpha.com/article/564881-how-germany-benefited-from-the-euro https://seekingalpha.com/article/564881-how-germany-benefite... https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/german-adjustment/ https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...
- dang 2y agoWould you please stop posting low-value comments that break the site guidelines? They explicitly ask you not to (a) go on about downvotes or (b) sneer at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- morjom 2y agoDid it happen yesterday? Did it happen last month? Did it happen last year? I feel like that's the order I ask questions if wonder when something happened.
- beardyw 2y ago> Driving on the right More people in India drive on the left than North America and Europe put together.
- lokimedes 2y agoThat would end all communication between frontend and backend developers.
- bsza 2y ago> Speaking English That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
- tsimionescu 2y agoMostly the same as today, if that was the only difference? Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
- bsza 2y agoWhat I was implying is, language barriers are a firewall against charismatic, manipulative psychopaths trying to brainwash you into doing unspeakable things. They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
- echoangle 2y agoYou think germany would have taken over europe by convincing them if the citizens of the other countries spoke german?
- bsza 2y agoThey had Europe's most accomplished public speaker and its best propagandist at their disposal, both of whom had a better understanding, or at least a more insidious approach, to crowd psychology than perhaps anyone at the time.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoI'd argue lacking a shared global language is more likely to isolate a population and ensure they can only hear the local mustache man's narrative.
- d-lisp 2y agoMaybe, maybe the world should standardize on: Driving on the left Speaking creole The metric system The 09/06/2024 date format The Kelvin scale The french decimal time system The AuthaGraph projection
- asddubs 2y ago230v 50Hz
- carlosjobim 2y ago> Speaking English Let's standardize that to the Newspeak version of English for clarity and to make hackers happy.
- emchammer 2y agoSorry, why would you write 2024? I thought it's the year 5784.
- euroderf 2y ago> Speaking English Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
- KSteffensen 2y agoAligning the EPAL pallet and the 30' container is another great candidate that is just not going to happen.
- Ekaros 2y agoWhich one should be changed? The pallet or the container?
- KSteffensen 2y agoWhichever is cheaper. My gut feeling says pallet, but I have no idea.
- matsemann 2y agoOne surprising (after we got a ticket..) thing about parking laws in Sweden is that you're also only allowed to park on the right side of the road / with the car in the direction of the traffic. This has the benefit of that when you're leaving the street parking, you are sitting close to the lane and can look behind you for coming cars and only cross one lane. Compared to parking on the "wrong" side, where you're sitting on the opposite side of the lane in your car, having your view of the opposing lane blocked by the parked car in front of you. As a cyclist I wish we had the same rule where I live. Far too often a car parked on the street will not see me when they try to exit their spot, as it's only when half the front of the car is in the cycle lane they actually can see past the other car.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- n_plus_1_acc 2y agoThis is the case in most of Europe. Another reason is that cars are required to have red reflectors at the back, but no reflectors at the front.
- gerikson 2y agoAs a Swede it amazes me that some countries allow parking "in the wrong direction". I've never even thought about it, and I don't know if it's a written rule (I'm sure it is, just it;s been a long time since I got my license).
- edb_123 2y agoYou don't have to go further than Norway to be allowed to park on both sides of the street (unless indicated otherwise by signs) as well as park in both directions. I believe many Norwegians have received parking tickets when visiting Sweden because if this difference. I wasn't aware of this myself until recently.
- gfna 2y agoIn finland this has been allowed since a few years ago. It is quite useful on narrow sidestreets in residential areas where it helps hunting for parking spaces. The biggest problem seems to be that now many misinterpret the law that one must leave 5 meters empty space before pedestrian crossings as being measured from the front of the car, ie not applying when parking on the ”wrong” side
- usr1106 2y agoWhen I was trainee in Stockholm in the 1980s most (if not all) escalators in the metro still run such that you had to take the left one.
- Jamie9912 2y agoTrain tracks in Sweden are still left-hand traffic
- usr1106 2y agoLike in France (excl. Alsace and Lyon metro). But which track trains use has extremely limited effects on the general public.
- piva00 2y agoIt's barely noticeable except when I come back from abroad and expect train doors to open on the wrong side, it happens maybe a couple of times until I get used to it again.
- usr1106 2y agoFor trains the door side is hardly ever standard, even if the train always uses a certain track out of 2 directional ones. Some stations have center platforms, others have side platforms. Maybe there is some network in the world with only one type, but in most cases they come in a mix.
- noduerme 2y agoStill on escalators everywhere, if you're standing, you stand on the right. If you're passing, you pass on the left.
- usr1106 2y agoEverywhere as everywhere in Sweden? I'd guess in London it's the opposite (has been a while, cannot remember).
- rjsw 2y agoI was in Sweden then, was only 2yo though so don't remember it, my parents felt the change went smoothly.
- chronogram 2y agoA trucker at the time said the transition was instant: people just did it, it was that easy.
- kabouseng 2y agoThere is a joke, that in order to facilitate such a change, it should be done in more manageable steps. So on day 1, only the motorcycles switch over to the other side of driving, on day 2 the motor vehicles, and on day 3 the trucks and busses switches over...
- Archelaos 2y agoMy version of the joke: "Have you heared: Britain wants to switch to right-hand traffic?" ... "Yes, but they want to do it step by step." ??? "They want to start with lorries first."
- user20180120 2y agoMaking everyone speak English should not happen! We need to understand that the language you are able to think in - limits your thinking. Some languages have things you cannot translate into English. These non translateable concepts do not exist in the Western world view point.
- nkozyra 2y agoI'm curious about examples. I know many languages do not have word::word translations, but a concept that cannot be translated -- even if it needs a full sentence, is a very different thing.
- Falkvinge 2y agoIt's like how the Inuit have 35 words for "snow", or the Swedish have 51 words for "tax evasion". Some cultures have a need for nuances that necessarily gets reflected into the local language, nuances which will be lost when bluntly translating into the one category-level word in English.
- Nzen 2y agoThe Inuit example is a common misconstrual [0]. The ancestor language has three root words that they might modify with a suffix in the way we might use a phrase 'snow on the ground'. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
- neontomo 2y agoThere are words/concepts that require you to have lived in that culture for some amount of time to understand the cultural baggage connected to the word, and how the word actually describes a part of the culture. As a Swede, one such word for me is `lagom`, which is often translated as `just right`, but this is a cop-out that doesn't do it justice. To understand it you must know, on a deeper level why a Swede values things being lagom, and this is surprisingly hard to put into words because it involves history, language, value systems, social patterns and even concepts like gratitude towards simple things. This word encapsulates a really big aspect of Swedish culture, making it impossible to translate accurately.
- Arnt 2y agoI cannot resist… I have to tell… when they did it, they had non-stop media coverage, as much as could possibly be done. An hour or two after traffic switched, TV broadcast from Svinesund, the biggest of the road crossings to Norway, and a major route for road haulage, and a reporter said something like "here we have the driver of a Norwegian 18-wheeler, <name>. Well, <name>, what do think of the big reform?" Norwegian, looking a little dense and speaking slowly: "Uh, what reform?" There was big signage everywhere. The reporter tried dropping a hint, the Norwegian truck driver refused to have noticed any change in the driving rules. Camera showed the very big 18-wheeler. The reporter dropped increasingly clearer hints and looked discomfited, the Norwegian still said "no, what reform, is anything new?" and eventually they cut the interview and switched back to the studio.
- hnarn 2y agoThis almost sounds like a sketch since Sweden has “Norway jokes” where the punchline is consistently how dumb Norwegians are — a structure that I’m sure is mirrored in Norway and similarly in other countries (england/scotland, france/belgium maybe?)
- lb1lf 2y agoOh yes. In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes. One quip which did the rounds in the papers prior to the Swedes starting to drive on the right was that they would perform the switch in several phases - first heavy traffic, then cars a month later...
- stareatgoats 2y ago> In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes This is a fairly recent development. When I moved to Sweden in the 1970s, it was so bad I learned Swedish at accelerated rate in order to avoid the kneejerk compulsion of many (if not most) Swedes to tell their favorite jokes about how dumb Norwegians seemed to be. No doubt a consequence of century-old rivalry and the fact that Sweden during the early part of the last century was the larger, richer, most industrialized and organized society in comparison. And they believed much of it to be actually true, in the way that derogatory humor always evokes some degree of "no smoke without fire." To this day, I meet swedes who are surprised at hearing that bananas are not actually called "gulebøj" in Norway (bended yellow) - a reference to how Norwegian is not as anglicized as Swedish, as there has been a pushback against this trend in Norway historically. As Norway has become progressively richer these jokes in Sweden about Norwgians have more or less disappeared however. The notion that Norwegians nowadays have the same jokes about Swedes is something I hear repeated, but it saddens me nonetheless because it doesn't rhyme with the spirit I remember from my childhood. If true, then it means that a fair number of my present (Swedish) countrymen are being denigrated, perhaps because Norway can now pride themselves on being the richest (real) country in the world per capita, so rich that a lot of swedes migrate here to take the worst paid jobs in restaurants and in hospitals. They are popular as employees because they understand the language and are hard working. And probably because they can take denigrating jokes, maybe because well, they used to do it too. But it's not all that funny, really.
- playingalong 2y agoThe somewhat hidden (non financial) cost seems to have been giving up on some of the existing public transport services - like trams. The Wikipedia article mentions that briefly towards the end.
- BurningFrog 2y agoI don't get why. Can't you just run the trams in the opposite direction?
- mongol 2y agoIt was not done throughout, but cities with trams with doors on only one side posed a problem. So it is my understanding that when such retrofits would have been to costly, the trams were decommissioned instead.
- renhanxue 2y agoThe trams were already on the way out in the 1950's, they were seen as a thing of the past that were inhibiting the development of the new car-centric urban areas. Several systems closed well before H-day, in the 50's and early 60's. The ones that closed on or around H-day were mainly in Stockholm and in Helsingborg. In Stockholm, plans had been made as early as the 1940's to gradually replace the tram network with the metro, and that did in fact happen. Today's green and red metro lines do in fact use old tram line alignments to a pretty significant extent (the younger blue line was all new and mostly blasted out of the bedrock deep underground). In 1957 the city council formally decided that the tram networks should be gone by the mid-1970's, at which time most of the infrastructure and rolling stock would have been considered end-of-life. All H-day did was accelerate this by a couple of years. Two suburban lines were kept though and they survive to this day, but at least up until the 1990's their future was kind of uncertain. Things finally changed in the mid-90's, and new light rail alignments started to get built again.
- bloomingeek 2y agoIn early 2001, my wife and I visited the beautiful country of New Zealand. The travel books told us to be aware that traffic flows opposite from the US. When we collected our rental car in Invercargill, there was a sticker near the steering wheel that read: "To stay alive, drive on the left!". We had a good laugh and drove away from the airport. We soon discovered that the raised middle finger was international. :)
- nisse72 2y agoYou probably also saw the arrows on the road itself as a reminder of the correct direction of travel. Those are always near any places tourists are likely to stop, since after a break it's common to forget which side to be on.
- bloomingeek 2y agoYes, and they were a much needed reminder. After a couple of days we had the direction figured out, although I still got confused entering a parking lot sometimes.
- alkonaut 2y agoHaving a non-binding referendum and moving against the 85% vote takes balls. And we're forever greatful that they did. Presumably people thought it would be inconvenient and voted no, while politicians realized the cost of doing it later would be much larger than just ripping the band aid off. At the time, the number of massive motorway crossings and similar was probably nearly zero. Today the cost would be unimaginable. We would have caved in the 70s at the latest, and at a cost many times larger.
- throwaway290 2y agoIf you already drove cars where drivers sit left side as Wikipedia says, what exactly were those 85% thinking about? Clearly not road safety?
- alkonaut 2y agoI think a large part were just ”no” to anything. Few I imagine were against right hand traffic but many simply resisted change. Only just half of voters voted, however.
- nobodyandproud 2y agoNIMBYism in a nutshell.
- nobodyandproud 2y agoDownvoted, but the down-voters have’t given thought to how closely coorelated this is.
- throwaway290 2y agoMaybe people just thought it's too far off topic + suddenly turning unrelated discussion into US politics...
- throwaway290 2y ago
- throwaway290 2y ago> changing to driving on the right reduced accidents while overtaking, as people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, thereby having a better view of the road ahead They already used left-hand drive vehicles but rode on the left?? That's just ridiculous and obvious why they switched...
- agency 2y agoThe "see also" section links to a similar changeover in Okinawa which mentions that a country having more than one traffic direction is in violation of the Geneva convention (on road traffic) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention_on_Road_Traffic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention_on_Road_Tr...
- dreamcompiler 2y agoIf this is a violation, the United States needs to fix its own problem. Left driving is the rule in the US Virgin Islands, and it's especially dangerous because (like Sweden before 1967) most cars there have left-hand steering and the roads are narrow.
- Someone 2y agoI don’t think the US Virgin Islands are part of the country called the United States of America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_Stat...: “American territories are under American sovereignty and, consequently, may be treated as part of the United States proper in some ways and not others (i.e., territories belong to, but are not considered to be a part of, the United States). Unincorporated territories in particular are not considered to be integral parts of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States applies only partially in those territories.” (This kind of stuff can be very convolutrd. There are parts of France that aren’t in the EU, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_France: “Overseas France (French: France d'outre-mer, also France ultramarine)[note 3] consists of 13 French territories outside Europe, mostly the remains of the French colonial empire that remained a part of the French state under various statuses after decolonization. Most, but not all, are part of the European Union”)
- cozzyd 2y agoHaving more than one Geneva convention sounds like a violation of the Geneva convention
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jackothy 2y agoI know of this one single intersection in northern Stockholm that still enforces left-hand traffic: https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGWr28JUQnEh9cXc6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/uGWr28JUQnEh9cXc6
- throwaway290 2y agoDoesn't need to be related to left-handed past. Just imagine those lanes were the other way around, then if you and me were going on Valhallavägen opposite directions and wanted to U turn over there at the same time then we can easily be in the way of each other. When you have two multi lane one way roads going opposite ways and want add a two-way connection between them then you often want to put lanes the opposite of normal way. Another example is all roads connecting Chiang Mai's old city outer and inner circle road. The country is left-handed but those connecting roads are right handed, the opposite of Stockholm intersection
- mncharity 2y ago> all roads connecting Chiang Mai's old city outer and inner circle road. Such as https://maps.app.goo.gl/uRzHBaZAY38rnjVS9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/uRzHBaZAY38rnjVS9 .
- jackothy 2y agoMakes perfect sense, thank you! I haven't seen any historical maps of the road so I no longer have any reason to believe it stems from that. I was just going based on that (flawed) logic.
- fragmede 2y agoDiverging diamond interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diverging_diamond_interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diverging_diamond_interchange
- MaximilianEmel 2y ago> Approximately 90 percent of Swedes drove left-hand drive vehicles This is probably why the adjustment was so smooth.
- rkagerer 2y agoInteresting how changing up the side of the road drivers use elevated their attention, resulting in less accidents, until the activity became second nature again. The relatively smooth changeover saw a temporary reduction in the number of accidents... These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to "normal" over the next six weeks Iceland saw a similar effect on "H-dagurinn" when they made the switch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn): Traffic accident rates briefly dropped as drivers overcompensated for the increased risk from driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, before returning to the level following the trend prior to the changeover.
- matsemann 2y agoYes, it's a thing that makes it hard for city planners and transport engineers when they test out new things. Any change often improves status quo in the start, so need to run it for long enough to actually gather valid data.
- cozzyd 2y agoSounds like we should have chaotic traffic patterns to improve safety.
- Fuzzwah 2y agoWhen I first visited Kuala Lumpur in Indonesia I was dumbfounded how there wasn't endless car accidents. The taxi from the airport was one of the scariest things in my life. Roads marked with 3 lanes had cars 5 abreast with scooters and motorbikes still finding just enough space to lane split. It really seemed like chaos to me. Didn't see a single bingle.
- cozzyd 2y agoIt sort of makes sense since most accidents are probably due to either inattentiveness or excessive speed.
- Too 2y agoSomething interesting is that roads don’t have the same properties if you just drive them the other direction. It’s not something you will immediately notice by just looking at the road, you have to think of the full picture. Imagine a fork vs a merge. You have buffer zones for off-ramps. Tight merges. Psychology of drivers. Reaction to signage. All this alters the flow of traffic and create undesired bottlenecks. In the bigger cities you can still find a few examples of such originally left roads around, with less ideal flow. Usually around tunnels where rework is difficult.
- fmobus 2y agoImagine trying to do this nowadays.
- m463 2y agoSmoother transition than ipv6.