The Official Shotgun Rules

Plain and simple, I carry a silver dollar in my pocket. I have two teenagers and they constantly fight for the front seat. So the simple thing to do is flip the coin. Looser of the last toss gets to call it.
If they fight while driving they both get evicted to the back seat and i sit up there alone. Cures the fight very quickly.
Sucks on a long trip but hey, live and learn...

When we used to drive round France in the late 60s early 70s Dad used to sit me down with a map the night before and tell me our objective for the next day - and I had to get us there. He taught me how to orient the map and how to make route cards, but if I told him a wrong turn he'd take it and just keep going until I noticed we weren't hitting villages in the right order and then I had to fix it on the fly.

In our family, with 4 girls, we traveled by car on our annual vacations. We only got to go shotgun if we could navigate. All four of us now have excellent map reading skills (we never get lost).

During my first shotgun, at about 12 yrs, my Dad was pulling a trailer, and I had to navigate Hwy 101 through San Francisco. Yikes!!!! I think we made it through without intervention from my mother (the official family navigator.)

FYI Hwy 101 through San Francisco is a maze of one-way streets.

Lewen - not all of us have passenger-side airbags. Hey - I got my first car with an airbag only five years ago.

The UK has rules about kids in front seats...
http://www.childcarseats.org.uk/law/index.htm

Wow, fun how we all have our own interpretations. For my group of friends in high school it was simple. If indoors, when the driver said "Let's go" then shotgun may be called. If we were returning from a movie or somewhere outside, shotgun could be called once the car was visible.