Why Do They Drive on the Left in the UK ?

'There are no plans to switch to driving on the right, the Department for Transport said.'
'The convention of driving on the left is thought to date back to Roman times.'

Photos via Getty Images
'There are no plans to switch to driving on the right, the Department for Transport said.' 'The convention of driving on the left is thought to date back to Roman times.' Photos via Getty Images
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Why Do They Drive on the Left in the UK ?

'There are no plans to switch to driving on the right, the Department for Transport said.'
'The convention of driving on the left is thought to date back to Roman times.'

Photos via Getty Images
'There are no plans to switch to driving on the right, the Department for Transport said.' 'The convention of driving on the left is thought to date back to Roman times.' Photos via Getty Images

Many people who visit the United Kingdom wonder why do people there drive on the left.

Gareth Edmunds, 59, from Bristol, said his theory is that it's something to do with times gone by when if you met a stranger on the road you'd pass on the left so your weapon arm was on their side. He also agrees with Stephen Laing, curator of the British Motor Museum in Warwickshire who believes that theory dates back to Roman times.

"Most people are right handed, naturally mount a horse from the left and so need their right hand free for combat," he elaborates.

"Roman armies marched on the left hand side of the carriageway and this is a convention that stayed."

Motoring author Giles Chapman said Britain's Highway Act of 1835 enshrined driving on the left in law for this country and its colonies.

"The rule was exported, for example, to Japan, where British engineers planned its railways to drive on the left, leading to a similar edict for road vehicles," BBC reported.

Richard Mace, 63, who lives near Chatham in the south-east of England, said he had always been curious as to why they drive on the right in the US.

"The reason I have been given goes back to when wagons were drawn by oxen," he said. He could be on the right track.

In the late 1700s wagons pulled by horses arranged in pairs became increasingly popular, Fraser McAlpine wrote for BBC America.

The driver sat on the back of the rear left-hand horse, to whip the others right handed.

The best way for one wagon to pass another without banging wheels was the right hand side of the road, according to McAlpine.

The government examined such a plan in 1969, two years after Sweden switched to driving on the right, according to BBC. Its report rejected the idea on grounds of safety and costs.

In 1969, the financial burden of making the switch was calculated by the government to be £264m.

That equates to about £4bn in today's money. But given the huge advances in infrastructure since 1969 this would now be an extremely conservative estimate.

Stephen Laing, curator at the British Motor Museum, said he could not see Britain swapping sides.

"I think we are kind of set in our ways," he said. "The infrastructure is built around driving on the left hand side. I can't really see that changing in the future."

The Department for Transport said: "We do not have a policy on this because it's not something we are interested in at this time.



The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
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The Surprising Reason Why There Are No Human Remains in the Titanic

The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
The RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 am Monday morning on April 15, 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

The Titanic, a symbol of hubris and human tragedy, has been a source of fascination for more than 112 years.

But the fact is, the sunken ocean liner was more than just movie fodder or a deep-sea explorer’s holy grail, it was a very real ship on which more than 1,500 people died.

And yet, whilst experts, using the most sophisticated submersible and underwater filming equipment, have found some extraordinary relics from the wreckage, they have never found any skeletons or bones.

“I’ve seen zero human remains,” James Cameron, director of the iconic 1997 film, told the New York Times back in 2012.

“We’ve seen clothing. We’ve seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. But we’ve never seen any human remains.”

Given that Cameron has visited and explored the wreck some 33 times (and claims to have spent more time on the ship than the ship’s captain), if he hasn’t seen any human remains we can assume that there really aren’t any there. So why is this?

It’s a question that has recently been perplexing Reddit users but, luckily, it has some relatively simple answers.

Whilst there was a notoriously insufficient number of lifeboats on the ship, many passengers and crew members still managed to put on life jackets. This means that they remained buoyant even after they succumbed to the freezing cold waters of the Atlantic.

And so, when a storm followed the sinking of the “unsinkable” ship, they were likely swept away from the site of the wreckage and carried further away over subsequent weeks and years by ocean currents.

“The issue you have to deal with is, at depths below about 3,000 feet (around 914 meters), you pass below what's called the calcium carbonate compensation depth,” deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard explained to NPR back in 2009.

“And the water in the deep sea is under saturated in calcium carbonate, which is mostly, you know, what bones are made of. For example, on the Titanic and on the Bismarck, those ships are below the calcium carbonate compensation depth, so once the critters eat their flesh and expose the bones, the bones dissolve,” he said.

Nevertheless, some people believe that there may still be some preserved bodies in sealed off parts of the ship, such as the engine room.

This is because fresh oxygen-rich water that scavengers rely on may not have been able to enter these areas.

Nevertheless, more than a century since the tragedy, it seems likely that such searches for remains would be fruitless.