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. But we drive on opposite sides, sometimes with hazardous effects.
And the United Kingdom isn’t the only country, of course, to do it the other way. It turns out that about 30% of the world’s countries mandate left-side driving and another 70% or so stay to the right. How it got that way is a winding tale.
In Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte played a central role. In the United States, Henry Ford often gets the credit, but that’s actually wrong. It goes much further back than Ford. Not only does traffic on the right pre-date cars, it pre-dates the establishment of the United States.
That’s how I ended up in a former tobacco drying barn in Conestoga, Pennsylvania, looking at a wagon – only a few days after I test drove a Tesla Cybertruck, its modern electric descendant. John Stehman, whose family has farmed land in the area since 1743, met me.
He’s president of the Conestoga Area Historical Society, and, as I had learned from research on the history of roads and driving, the Conestoga wagon was key to this whole story.
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