this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Today I learned

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TIL that the red&green maritime navigational markers are the opposite in the Americas (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Having been a sailor for 40 years, I am better at "red&green" than "left&right", and I always knew that red was on the left and green on the right (duh, obviously).

When I was young, my dad (also a sailor) even made a point of mounting one red and one green grip on my bicycle handlebar; of course I did the same with with boys' bikes.

Well, today I learned that this is called "Region A", and the Americas and a few other countries are called "Region B" where the red&green is reversed: red is on the right (and green on the left)!

To make things even weirder, navigational lights are not reversed in Region B.

Mind blown.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

To make things even weirder, navigational lights are not reversed in Region B.

Actually, that makes the most SENSE. My first thought when I read this was "wait, Red = Port and Starboard = Green, if you flip them for some countries, what happens when they're out of the region of water where it's flipped?"

The fact that that it's apparently consistent for navigational lights only seems logical.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

You are definitely correct, otherwise it would be like Japanese cars having red headlights and white taillights = mayhem. I just don't grok how or why the buoys came to be different.