- Messages
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My Godfathers's a Brit. I think a lot of my crazier side I learned from him. He was a physician, an RAF Pilot who flew in the Battle of Britain, an ex-racing car driver (GT class at Le Mans amongst others), rode a Vincent Black Lightning and imported my Dunstall Norton Commando for me. All in all a pretty mechanical guy ... but ... I was riding with him in a left hand drive British sports car in San Jose, CA in the late 1960s, we were downtown early one Sunday morning, no traffic to speak of, he stopped to make a left hand turn from the left hand turn lane of a four lane artery and turned into the left hand lane of a similar artery, on the left side of center median. Now had there been traffic coming at us I suspect this would not have occurred, but the lack of that sort of a cue and being relaxed and in conversation, even for one as competent as he was, he screwed up, bad. No damage done, a quick U-turn, no cops around, but he was somewhat embarrassed. It can happen to the best....
Here on SB we routinely make comparisons between dive (SCUBA) skills and driving (a vehicle) skills, so here's one that I see as rather parallel. In North America and many other parts of the world people drive on the right hand side of the road with the steering wheel on the left side of the car and the gear shift to their right. I learned to drive under those conditions, and in snow. In half of the countries in which I've lived (three of the six), however, we drive on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car and the gear shift to the left. When I moved from Rio de Janeiro Brazil to London England years and years ago and got a UK driver's license, nobody asked me to retrain for driving on the other side of the road even though it's definitely different. It took some adjustment, especially shifting a manual transmission left handed, but these adjustments were minor in comparison with my understanding of the rules of the road, how to react in the case of an incident, etc. Similarly, no amount of driving in snow and on ice, as stressful as it is, could have prepared me for the chaos that is driving in a big Brazilian city, even on the same side of the road! But still, I was issued a DL and allowed out on the streets, where I carefully and conscientiously acquired the additional skills I needed to be a successful driver there (including growing eyes in the back of my head). ...
I don't ride bikes much anymore, but I do have trouble with the left foot shift / right foot brake, having almost all of my riding experience on 1950s thru 1970s British bikes.
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