it's arguable the "much of the rest of the world" could refer to number of countries rather than number of people, but I think "much of" applies to both so the author avoided the confusion.

> Left is right and right is wrong

one of cool road signs I saw years ago in Ladakh state on road from Manali to Leh. Funnily enough that 19h minibus trip sometimes went through valleys without any form of road, just used least uneven path. Not so funnily enough we had an obvious technical stop later when driver was banging with huge rock on some part of suspension for an hour, and luckily his caveman engineering worked well enough to get us moving again

I believe their point is that a mile is defined to be exactly 1609.344 meters, a gallon is defined to be exactly 3.785411784 litres, a pound (mass) is defined to be exactly 453.59237 grams and so on. These are all just weird multiples of metric units at this point.

I am told that Left Hand Drive is marginally safer (all other things being equal) because of the preponderance of right-handed people. Driving on the left of the road places the right-handed driver's dominant hand on the wheel and dominant eye towards the centre of the road and oncoming traffic.

However this is not an argument in favour of 20th century style, non-autonomous individual vehicles as the main transit solution. There are safer and better ways. Autonomous Vehicles will hopefully play a role in that.

Iceland did it a year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn, but since there was less then 200k people living there it was a much less dramatic change

IIRC a lot more countries did it but mostly a lot earlier (pre ww2).

Back then it would have been comparatively easy, cars were slow and there were barely any street signs etc anyway

Falkland Islands did it for a brief second, though not by choice.

And there's a fun little dance where the roads meet.

In the eastern parts of Russia (well even in "central" Russia like Novosibirsk), there's a lot of imported Japanese cars from their second-hand market. These have the wheels "on the wrong side", but nobody cares, they still drive on the right.

The US has a 240 volt electric system nearly everywhere. The exceptions are some industrial factories that get higher voltage. There might be a handful of houses that haven't upgraded their electric system since the 1950s that are still 120volt only, but that is very rare (I've heard of it, but never seen it). We use 120 volts to outlets (120 is half of 240), but the system itself is 240 volts.

Would you care to cite the statistics you have showing higher per-capita accidental electric shock deaths? I'm struggling to find any.

Electric distributon costs less because less copper/aluminum. 120V exists because the US is plagued by lawyers.

I don't know why you expect me to be a partisan for it, given the best thing I said about it was "driving on it is a non-event".

Experimentation with junction design has been a good thing in the UK. Many of the designs are, however, attempts to do as well as possible in the space, because a better design would require compulsorily purchasing some people's houses or gardens. So, although there are not lots of magic roundabouts, there are lots of agglomerations of mini-roundabouts with slightly different topology , many of which are more annoying (but fit in the space, and keep traffic flowing).

However, it does seem likely that this is kept mainly because of its fame. I seem to recall that there was a proposal to replace it which was shouted down.

It was designed by the Road Research Laboratory and has been measured to have better traffic throughput than the conventional roundabout it replaced.