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Comment by mattnewport | Hacker News Reader

The British Highway Code states for pedestrians:

If there is no pavement, keep to the right-hand side of the road so that you can see oncoming traffic.

(http://www.highwaycodeuk.co.uk/rules-for-pedestrians---gener...)

For the Americans, pavement in British English means sidewalk :)

After learning this (in school road safety lessons I think?) in general I always assumed you should walk on the right as a pedestrian for consistency (even though the highway code doesn't contain any rules for sidewalks) but it's not universally observed, particularly in London where there are so many foreign tourists.

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"in general I always assumed you should walk on the right as a pedestrian for consistency"

You walk facing traffic not for consistency, but so that you can see what's trying to hit you. It doesn't apply so much for pavement/sidewalk, but you'll certainly live longer when there's no clearly separated area for peds.

You have the same in Germany, but obviously for the left-hand side.

That said, people do tend to walk on the right-hand side as far as I can tell, following the traffic. So, no consistency. The 'no pavement' is already exceptional. Walking on the other side of the road in that case is just part of that experience.. :)

In Sweden, where people drive on the right, I have have heard that you should walk on the left side of the road if there is no sidewalk. But, when on a sidewalk or footpath people will keep to the right.

Another curiosity with Sweden is that priority to the right has been codified in law since the switch to right-hand traffic, but has never actually been practised by motorists. Instead they have a bunch of unwieldy and dangerous ad hoc rules, such as priority-to-the-crossbar-in-T-intersections and priority-to-the-slightly-larger-road-in-4-way-intersections.

Also confusingly, when Swedes are about to make a left turn they keep to the far right instead of the more logical left, and vice versa.

Obviously, if the road you are coming on is perpendicular to another and dead-ends (what I assume you mean by a T-intersection), then you should have a stop sign, and the road that isn't dead-ending shouldn't have any stop-signs.

With the four-way you describe, I would usually expect to see a single light, with it blinking yellow on the primary route, and blinky red on the secondary road.

T-junctions in Sweden often have a stop or yield sign, but not always. When they don't drivers on the through road should yield to cars turning in from the right, but in practice the rarely do. Stop lights are not common in smaller, low traffic junctions.

Something felt off the first time I took the subway in Stockholm. It took me a minute to realize that the train was running the other direction, obviously a relic nobody bothered to change that has become codified in modern-day transportation law.

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