Next week the maximum speed in our country will be reduced to 100 km / h. It is an operation for which Rijkswaterstaat must make every effort to ensure that the signs are right everywhere. Yet it will be a breeze compared to September 3, 1967, the day that Sweden switched from left to right driving.
Högertrafikomläggningen: Swedish scrabblers must have experienced heyday around September 3, 1967, the day that Sweden switched from left to right. The word means traffic diversion and was called Days H (H-Day). Admittedly, mirroring the complete traffic image requires a little more from people than reducing the speed limit, but there are certainly similarities with the operation that the Netherlands stands for next weekend.
The remarkable thing was that most cars in Sweden had already been steered to the left for those years and that, together with the fact that all the surrounding countries were driving on the right, road safety certainly did not benefit. The cars might then be ready, but that was not the case for almost everything else. For example, almost all 360,000 road signs had to be crossed or replaced, road markings changed, intersections redesigned, bus stops shifted to the other side and – yes – all 8,000 city buses were rebuilt or replaced. Moreover, of course it had to be in the minds of all Swedes and anyone who has ever taken to the road in a left-handed country will agree that this really takes some getting used to.
Sweden was therefore completely captivated by this change in the run-up to H-Day. Days H got its own logo, which really popped up everywhere in those days; from billboards to milk cartons. Countless municipal workers, assisted by soldiers, spent a long night on it before the Swedish radio could count down to 5.00 in the Sunday morning; the starting signal for the new, right-wing era. The total operation cost around 628 million crowns (of which 43 million for the publicity campaign), converted to the current price level of 275 million euros.
“This is a huge change in our daily lives. Of course there was a lot of skepticism, but our inner resistance to this fundamental change in our daily traffic has had to make way for international rationalism and we are confident that our road safety will reap the benefits of this change. I dare say that never before has a country invested so much manpower and money in uniform, international traffic rules. ” According to Olof Palme after the radio countdown, then Minister of Transport and Communications, later Prime Minister and victim of an unsolved murder.
Perhaps it was also because the change made drivers extra alert, but the fact is that the turnaround led to an immediate decrease in the number of road casualties. The first “right” Monday there was not one single traffic death in Sweden. Unfortunately, this effect turned out to be temporary, because after three years the black figure was back to before September 3, 1967 (more than 1,300 road deaths and 21,000 injured per year), although this is partly due to the fact that car ownership in Sweden increased considerably in the late 1960s.
In any case, there is one Swedish who has reaped lasting benefits from Dagen H. A seventeen-year-old, somewhat shy and rather unknown singer sang that evening on television her self-written song ‘Jag var så kär’ for and because almost everyone was glued to their homes and hanging from the tube, with a choice of only one channel, Dagen H marked the definitive breakthrough for Agnetha Fältskog. Speaking of fruits: there will probably be a lot of Sweden walking around born in the beginning of June 1968; not even Agnetha could fascinate anyone.
More than half a century later, we dare to hijack the concept of Days H and replace the word Högertrafikomläggningen with Hundred (sorry scrabbelaars), and we express the expectation that the habituation process of our H-Day will be a lot smoother. Plus the silent hope that it will also yield us a grande lady like Agnetha Fältskog. However, we do not expect a birth wave mid-December.