I drove out to Pennsylvania’s rural Amish country to see a man about a wagon. I was looking to nail down the answer to a question I’ve had since 2015 when I traveled to England on a work trip. Back when I was motoring through London, very carefully, in a Mini Cooper, I wondered: Why was I driving on the “wrong” side of the road? I’m from the United States, which started as a bunch of former British colonies. We speak the same language, more or less.
Some people credit Henry Ford with standardizing US traffic on the right side of the road because, in 1908, Ford Motor Co. put the steering wheel on the left side of the hugely popular Model T. Really, though, Ford was just responding to driving habits that had been largely established long before. The really weird thing is that most of the rest of Europe, besides Britain, drives on the right like Americans do.