Did you know. At 2:00 am April 15 1923, Cape Bretoners, like other Nova Scotians, stopped driving automobiles and horse-drawn vehicles on the left-hand side of the road and started driving on the right hand side. Horses were well-trained and very habitual in their trips into Canada. On reaching the middle of the bridge after the changeover, they automatically moved to the left as they had always done, causing some mayhem with motorists and others travelling south. It was some time before all of the teams had been re-trained to stay to the right for the entire trip.
The same problem apparently occurred between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in the four and a half months they had different driving laws. There were other considerations as well resulting from the changes. The History of Automobiles website reports that “Nova Scotia Tramways & Power Company Limited, which owned and operated the electric streetcar system in Halifax, sued the provincial government to recover the cost of changing the doors on all streetcars to the other side, and the cost of changes in track layout. In Lunenburg County, 1923 is still known as The Year of Free Beef; the price of beef dropped precipitously because oxen which had been trained to keep to the left could not be retrained — oxen are notoriously slow-witted — and many teamsters had to replace their oxen with new ones trained to keep to the right; the displaced oxen were sent to slaughter.”
