Short Stuff: Dagen H

One day in 1967, Sweden changed what side of the road its citizens drive on. It went surprisingly well, considering.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
And I got a de vita everybody, and welcome to
the short Stuff. It's Josh and Chuck and there's Jerry
over there, uh somewhere out there in the ether, right,
I hope so, and this is this is stuff you
should know, short stuff. We should probably stop horsing around. Yeah. So,
I don't know why you said in a gotta DaVita.

(00:25):
I'm assume is that. No, I think it's a pig
Latin or gibberish. Oh really, yeah, it's in the garden
of Eden. But for some reason he said in a
gota devita? Why did you say it for this show?
It's just fun. It's a pleasant thing to hear. Don't
you think I thought it was an Easter egg? No? No,
and now it's just totally ruined. Well, we are talking

(00:49):
about a pretty interesting thing that you uh teased out
on an episode we did recently, and one that is
from an episode. Well it's not from an episode, but
there's all so visible episode about this there is if
you want to hear a better version in that way, right, Roman,
Roman has this beaten just about every way, but we'll

(01:10):
try our best. Right, So, what we're talking about today
is called dogging h and dogging h um is Swedish
for our day or right day h. The H stands
for hougar, which is um, the Swedish word for right.
And what the whole thing was really talking about was

(01:30):
something called man huger traffic calm log ningjin. I don't
know if nice is the right word, but sure, thank you,
And what that means is the right hand traffic diversion.
And ultimately, what all of this, all these words and
oom lots all piled together mean is that this is
the day dogging h September three, ninety seven when Sweden

(01:54):
said we're no longer driving on the left hand of
the road like we have been since seventeen thirty four,
where all of a sudden, on one day going to
switch over to the right hand side. That's right, And uh,
I think did you mention when they how long they
had been driving on the other side. Yes, it's seventeen
thirty four. It's a long time. So what you're having

(02:15):
to do is there's a couple of factors here. You've
got to teach people how to do this literally, so
they put together a pamphlet that literally told you how
to do it, and then you gotta it's an infrastructure
project supposedly the largest driving related infrastructure project ever undertaken

(02:37):
by any country. Oh really, I know. It's definitely Sweden's
largest infrastructure project to that day. It was the largest
for for any country as far as traffics are related,
largest traffic related infrastructure. Yes, what I just said protect Okay,
I just couldn't believe my ears chuck, but um, yeah, yeah.
So yeah, there's an infrastructure section of it, and then

(02:57):
there's the public information camp paint and it was a
lot more than just like a pamphlet. Pamphlets were stepped
like one dot you know, oh, we'll go with indicating
that there's plenty other steps. How about that? And one
some of the other things they did was, um, TV ads,
radio ads, newspaper ads. They came up with a logo

(03:18):
for dogging age that was everywhere. Um. They had a
a song contest to pick us a theme song for
dog and h and they came up with a good Boy.
I'm sure you listened to it. Yeah, it was good
of you. Oh yeah. Uh. It was called well the
American translation is keep to the Rights Vincente and it

(03:44):
was by the Telestars and it was like you said,
selected by a vote. It actually reached number five on
their their charts, whatever the Swedish charts are. Uh. And
there was also a weird little sly side meeting because
apparently keeping it to the right means to be faithful
to your significant other as opposed to cheating on some

(04:05):
which is going left. Oh, I hadn't heard that before. Yeah, wow, chuck,
that's some. That's a deep cut right there. It's fairly deep.
So then the name of the song in Swedish is
hall dig Tail Hougar Svenson. And um. I listened to
it enough that I could have sung it, but enough
time is the lap? Since I've heard it's gone? Can

(04:26):
you say it would have been great? No? Do you
think we've talked about it enough to play it at
any point? Or do we have to just tell people
who go look it up on YouTube? Uh? No? I mean,
let's could we play like a version where we won't
get sued? Uh? I don't know. We'll find out in
the getit? How about that? All right? Well, let's play
a little part right now here is hall dig Tail
Huger Svenson by the Telestars. I'm not it's just bad

(04:59):
about it. Catch is is it gets I'm surprised it
only rose to number five on the Huge Parade. Yeah. Uh,
here's the thing with h Day though, Um, you know,
every municipality had to deal with their own issues. They
had to change. I mean, when you think about it,
it's not just about educating the public. That pamphlet. That
pamphlet I mentioned. Uh, I want to make it clear

(05:21):
that was not just like, hey, here's what we're doing.
It is here is how to drive on the other
side of the road. And then um, you've got uh,
street signs, you've got bus stops, you've got traffic lights,
you got bicycle lanes, you got one way streets, you
got busses that have doors on one side of the
vehicle that now need doors on the other side. It

(05:43):
was huge. Yeah. What one of the other things too,
was the Swedes didn't even want to do this. There
was a there was a referendum that had been held
ten years before when they started thinking about doing this,
and like of Swedish voters said no, Yeah, they did
want to start driving on the right hand side of
the road, and the government said, well, we're doing it anyway.

(06:05):
And the reason why they wanted to do this in
the first place was because Sweden was um kind of
lagging behind the rest of Europe, which had started to
increasingly or the rest of the world, I should say,
which has started to increasingly drive on the right hand
side of the road, and so that was one thing.
Sweden didn't want to look backwards or anything like that.
But then the other thing is that they the government

(06:25):
was like, this may cause fewer fatalities because while we
drive on the left side of the road, we're buying cars,
including Volvos, that are designed to be driven on the
right hand side of the road. So you're driving on
the left hand side of the road on the left
side of your car, which means you were just kind
of looking down into this little ditch next to you
with oncoming traffic, which seems it seems reasonable that they

(06:47):
thought this was a dangerous situation. Yeah, you know, I
never really considered that because I didn't wonder what the
big deal was. My only experience, I think I've said
before was when we were on the Australian Tour, I
drove opposite side and right hand side, steering wheel wise.
But now that I think about it, I guess it
would be a little weird to be opposite side with

(07:10):
the regular setup, right, Yeah, it would be a little weird,
like you'd be really far removed from kind of where
you need to be paying the most attention, I think
is the thing. And and and they ultimately did show
a decline in traffic accidents and fatalities because of DOGG
and H, but they think it was because people were
just paying more attention getting used to driving on the

(07:31):
right hand side, because within two years it went back
up to about normal. Yeah. I think people are a
little extra cautious, which is great. Um, here's the thing, though,
when you do something like this, it's not like little
by little over the course of a month you can
start changing street signs, because that would be chaos. So
the night before and the day before they had to
shut down basically almost all traffic. You had to have

(07:54):
special permissions to have a car on the road at all.
And they had to change three hundred and sixty thousand
street signs in less than twenty four hours. Were they successful.
We'll let you know right after this message breaks. Okay, Chuck,

(08:35):
I can't stand the tension any longer. Were they successful
in changing three hundred and sixty thousand street signs all
across Sweden in one single night. Well, I want to
say for sure, my gut says they may have missed
one or two, okay, but over over, overall they were
very successful. At four fifty in the a m on September,

(08:59):
bunch bunch of people came out to watch. There were
cars on the road and they said stop, go to
the other side, and directed people the other side and
said all right, have have a blast everybody. Yeah. There
was like a countdown on the radio, and then there
was the announcement after after they reached one that Sweden
now drives on the right hand side of the road

(09:21):
and everybody could start driving. And I'm sure they were
like wobbling and weaving and kind of like little kids
on a bike with training wheels or after having the
training was taken off. I should say, I'll bet it
was adorable to see. But um there were the next
day that was a Sunday at like five am when
they started, and the next the next business day, Monday.

(09:41):
There were no fatalities. Nobody died and they were like
a hundred and fifty seven car wrex, which is slightly
lower than a normal Monday in Sweden. Yeah, and it
was not cheap either. Obviously it's gonna cost a ton
of money. At the time it costs six million kroner,
which was astronaut Yeah, it's about three and sixteen million

(10:03):
American dollars today, but about five more than the government's
estimated budget, which is not a bad overrun, No, not
at all. And um, if you read some of the
articles on it we we used, in addition to a
couple of others, this one BBC article about it that
was super interesting. They pointed out some of the people
who were there and took part in this point out like, dude,

(10:24):
you that was ridiculously cheap, even for the time, for this,
the massive scale of this, not just the infrastructure again
but also the all of the public information campaign too.
They they did it for cheap, and they did it
really quickly. Yeah, it's it was quite a project. My
hat is off to them for doing it by all accounts,

(10:46):
like pretty successfully. Yeah, they did it, and they said
that's great. But then, like I said, traffic fatalities went
back up, um after a couple of years when people
got used to it, and so UM Sweden undertook a
projects starting in that UM that said, we're we we
don't want any traffic fatalities no matter what side of

(11:08):
the road we drive on, um, in our country. So
they came up with a program called Vision Zero, and um,
they've just been slowly but surely trying to whittle down
the number of traffic fatalities and in two thousand and
sixteen it was down to two hundred and seventy. That's
a minuscule amount for a country the size of Sweden

(11:28):
for an entire year. So who knows if they'll ever
get to zero, but hats off to them for also
for for trying to do that. Yeah, and for digging
up Telestar to cut the hit song Vision zero, right,
they literally had to dig one of the members up.
Oh man, Yeah, I got nothing else except to recommend

(11:50):
the Invisible episode because they do their show a little differently,
so they got some cool interviews with people that were
there at the time, and um, it's always you know,
a little more dressed up than our show, and by
that I mean way more dressed up. Agreed, they do
it very well over there. So uh, that's it for
short stuff. Go ahead on over to nine Invisible and
we will see you next time. How ddios Stuff you

(12:15):
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