Here’s why Americans drive on the right and the UK drives on the left

One challenge Americans face when visiting the United Kingdom is learning to drive on the “wrong” side of the road. The British drive on the left side of the road while we, in America, drive on the right side.

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 played a central role. In the US, 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. These big wagons, with their tall, arched cloth roofs, became icons of America’s westward expansion as they carried the belongings of pioneers from the east out to the frontier. Back in the early 1700s, though, western Pennsylvania was the distant frontier.