I thought I would use the blog entry today to impart an interesting fact on you. Did you ever wonder why we drive on the right side of the road, but we sit in the left seat of the car? Until I heard the answer, I for one had never really noticed that this phenomenon was strange. I guess we grow up with a certain reality and really never question the oddness of it all.
Well, the answer is that we actually DID sit on the right side at one time. You have to go back all the way to the days of when we drove horse-drawn carriages and buckboards. (If you are interested in the difference between a carriage and a buckboard, I would be happy to entertain you with that answer as well. Throw in a wagon to the mix and you can have quite a discussion.) Men driving their carriages and buckboards down the street carried whips to prod their horses on. As they swung their whips out in an arc, they would unfortunately hit pedestrians walking down the sidewalks as well. To remedy this situation men started sitting on the left side of their vehicles so their whips wouldn't reach all the way to the walks.
The question you might ask now, which was the next one to pop into my mind, was why is it that we drive down the right side of the road and the English drive on the left? I have not researched it, but from my limited knowledge of history I would conjecture that it has something to do with the Revolutionary War. Early Americans were so eager to have nothing to do with Great Britain anymore that they strove to do things differently from their English cousins. So, if the English are going to drive on the left, then we shall drive on the right!
If anybody has different answers to these questions, then please feel free to voice your opinions here.
