I did the "recce both ways" bit, as you say good for finding path junctions and the like.

Dunno why there should be a discrepancy between pre-web and current ratios - the law of big numbers would suggest that given equal validity of the choices things even themselves out over time. I suspect that a lot of decisions come down to something along the lines of "I supported X going this way and know it so I'll go that way round as well".

As for online info being biased towards clockwise, I can only comment on my own stuff: they default to clockwise but you can set them up for anti-clockwise. The code used for the calculator and other stuff had to have a default and since BG went clockwise I went with that.