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by By Robert Mackey
Early on Tuesday, the nation of Samoa officially defected from right to left, leaving the fraternity of nations that drive their cars of the right side of the street to the (now) growing club of leftists.
The change — which was made for economic reasons, to bring the country in line with its neighbors in New Zealand and Australia and so make it easier to import small, fuel-efficient used cars from those countries — was marked by a two-day national holiday and a three-day ban on alcohol sales.
As an editorial in The Samoa Observer noted:
At 6 a.m. local time, the BBC reports , Samoan Prime Minister Tuila’epa Sailele Lupesoliai Malielegaoi made the switch official with these words: “After this announcement you will all be permitted to move to the other side of the road, to begin this new era in our history.”
It has been four decades since a country switched from driving on one side of the road to the other, and the previous trend had been markedly in the opposite direction. As an article from Time magazine’s archive noted, when — after “a brief but monumental traffic jam” — Sweden switched to driving on the right side of the road in 1967, the move was part of a standardization across continental Europe. That switch was resisted by drivers on the British Isles, and in many former parts of the British empire, including India, Pakistan and parts of Africa, left remains right.
Just last year, however, Reuters reported that an Irish politician, concerned about running head-on into immigrant drivers from Eastern Europe, had proposed that “Ireland should consider giving up driving on the left to reduce accidents by foreigners accustomed to right-side motoring.” That proposal was made in February 2008, before a rapid economic slowdown stopped the flow of European workers to Ireland and made it unlikely that the cash-strapped Irish government would want to take on a massive project that would also have introduced chaos at the now barely perceptible line where Ireland and Northern Ireland meet.
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