The world's weirdest road rules

Here are just a few of the weirdest, wacky and wonderfully obscure road rules and regulations from around the world.

In Sweden, it’s illegal to drive without your headlights turned on, even during the day. If you leave them off, you’ll usually find that other drivers flash their lights at you as they drive by. Daytime running lights or DRLs as they are known came to prominence from this rule and are now incorporated into most new cars available in Sweden and around the world.

If you’re on a holiday in South Africa and want to pull over to feed the wildlife, that's probably not a great idea for many reasons. Not only is it illegal to do so, but it’s also very dangerous! Plus, if you get caught, you’ll pay a big fine.

In Moscow you could receive a fine for having a dirty car. The law was originally created to ensure licence plates remained visible during the very cold and snowy months. This is an interesting law as for residents it is also illegal to wash your car anywhere besides your own home or a car wash.

To try to curb the heavy city traffic, car licencing laws called ‘colour coding’ are enforced. This means on specific days of the week, drivers can be fined if they are caught in congested zones, or if their vehicles number plate ends with a certain number. For example it is illegal for vehicles with licence plates ending in 1 or 2 to drive on Monday between 7am and 7pm on most major roads. The penalty for doing so is confiscation of your driver's license or a fine starting from P300.00 or $7.50 AUD.

In Spain, it pays to know the day of the week with many towns having parking rules which permit parking on one side of the street for the first half of the month and on the other side for the second half of the month. When it comes to one-way streets, you can park on the side with even house numbers on even-numbered days of the month and on the side with odd numbers on odd-numbered days.

As far as weird and complex laws and regulation goes, Switzerland takes the cake. Swiss residents who hope to spend their Sunday afternoon washing their pride and joy in their driveway are actually forbidden to do so. Local Swiss laws prohibit the use of a power washer and there is concern that the detergents would pollute the ground water and environment. Washing your car at a car wash on the other hand, is not a problem.

The USA is the land of the free, home of the brave and full to the brim with strange local state laws which in some cases are very specific.

In Alabama it is legal to drive the wrong way down a one-way street as long as you have a lantern attached to the front of your car. It is illegal to drive blindfolded in Alabama though. Who’d have thought?

In San Francisco, it is illegal to clean your windscreen with a dirty pair of underpants.

If you’re driving around Oklahoma but you also want to read your favourite comic book at the same time, unfortunately for you, it’s illegal. No word on whether you can do a Sudoku instead though.

Thinking you’ll commute down a highway by Camel on your next Vegas trip? Think again. It is illegal to drive a camel on a highway in Nevada. Camels were brought to the state in the late 1800’s and were a method of transportation so the laws passed back then still remain today.

We couldn’t have a world’s weirdest road rules without an entry from Australia. Although it was changed in 1980, prior to that in Melbourne, it was illegal for a taxi to drive around without a hay bale in its boot. Another law from a bygone era where taxis were horse drawn and not LPG powered, it was a requirement to have a hay bale on board to feed hungry livestock.

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