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Rules of the road are the general practices and procedures followed by people on roads, especially those driving cars or on bicycles or other vehicles. They govern interactions with other vehicles, and with pedestrians. The basic traffic rules are defined by an international treaty under the authority of the United Nations, the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. Not all countries are signatory to the convention and, even among those that are, local variations in practice may be found. Driving safely is usually easier if a driver can adapt to both written and unwritten local rules of the road.
These rules should be distinguished from the mechanical procedures required to operate one's vehicle. See driving.
see also road
The first rule to learn for a particular country is which side to drive on. This is so fundamental that it is sometimes known simply as the rule of the road.
In countries where traffic drives on the right:
and conversely.
Traffic flow and road design in both cases are each other's mirror image.
With regard to the driver's seat: Most early motor cars had the drivers seat in the middle. Later some manufacturers chose to have the driver's seat nearest the centre of the road in order to look out for oncoming traffic whilst others chose to put the seat on the other side so that the drivers could avoid damaging their vehicles on walls, hedges, roadside gutters and other obstacles. Eventually the former idea prevailed.
Approximately one quarter to one third of the world's countries drive on the left-hand side of the road. Most of the countries that drive on the left are former coloniesThis article refers to a colony in politics and history. For alternate meanings of colony see colony (disambiguation). In politics and in history, a colony is an administrative unit under the control of a geographically- distinct entity, usually an autono of the British EmpireThe British Empire in the early decades of the 20th century, held sway over a population of 400 500 million people (roughly a quarter of the world's population), and covered nearly 30 million square kilometres, (roughly two-fifths of the world's land area. There are exceptions: JapanJapan (, Nippon/Nihon literally "the origin of the sun") is a country in East Asia situated on a chain of islands east of the Asian continent on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. The largest of these islands are, from north to south, Hokkaido , Honsh, IndonesiaThe Republic of Indonesia the world's largest archipelago, is located between the Southeast Asian peninsula and Australia, between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Indonesia borders Malaysia on the island of Borneo ( Kalimantan in Bahasa Indonesia), Papua N, Macau and Thailand drive on the left, although they were never British colonies; and Canada and the United States drive on the right, although they were.
The first legal reference in Britain to an order for traffic to remain on the left occurred in 1756 with regard to London Bridge. The General Highways Act of 1773, contained a recommendation that horse traffic remain on the left and this was enshrined in the Highways Bill in 1835.
The British author C. Northcote Parkinson has presented a "proof" that the British way of driving (on the left side of the road) is the natural one.