The wider world

While the road switch in Samoa has been getting attention regionally for a few months now, the world is now watching, not, perhaps with great expectations, but mostly due to the curiosity factor.
Changing sides of the road is a rare thing for a country to undertake. Especially a developing country that is not changing sides for safety reasons. The main reason(of several strange ones)that the government provides is that cars are cheaper to import from New Zealand and since New Zealand drives on the left, so should Samoa.
Now this is odd for 3 reasons:
1) Cars were imported from New Zealand up until 2005 when the government banned them due to safety concerns.
2) Cars from New Zealand could be imported without changing the direction of traffic.
3) There has been no analysis that has shown cars are actually cheaper when imported from New Zealand.
To top all of this off, is the fact that at the time of the road switch in 16 days there will be 18800 Right side vehicles (the side that is normal in the United States and Europe) and about 4000 left side vehicles (the side that is normal in New Zealand and India). This means that 80% of the cars will go from being on the "right" side of the road to the "wrong" one over night. Well actually at 6am on Monday morning.
So, obviously, with a lack of clear reasoning and a very costly and dangerous government mandated change, the world is curios. Unfortunately this is the sort of curiosity that people express at formula 1 races where they are curious to see who will crash and burn ...
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/14/driving_on_left/index.html