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Högertrafikomläggningen means: right-hand traffic diversion.
Its mission was to put Sweden on the same path as the rest of its continental European neighbours, most of which had long followed the global trend to drive cars on the right.
(The swapped direction of the blue arrow road sign became an iconic symbol for the Dagen H project (Credit: Jan Søndergaard) )
As well as hoping to boost the country’s international reputation, the Swedish government had grown increasingly concerned about safety, with the number of registered vehicles on the roads shooting up from 862,992 a decade earlier to a figure of 1,976,248 recorded by Statistics Sweden at the time of H-Day. Sweden’s population was around 7.8 million.
Despite driving on the left, many Swedes already owned cars with the steering wheel on the left-hand side of the vehicle, since many bought from abroad and major Swedish car manufacturers such as Volvo had chosen to follow the trend. However, there were concerns that this was a factor in rising numbers of fatal road traffic accidents, up from 595 in 1950 to 1,313 in 1966, alongside an increased frequency of collisions around Sweden’s borders with Denmark, Norway and Finland.
“The market for cars in Sweden was not so big and so we tended to buy left-driven cars,” explains Lars Magnusson, a professor in economic history at Uppsala University. “But that meant that you would be sitting on the opposite side to what made sense… and you were looking down into the ditch!”
‘Incredibly hard’
In the run-up to H-Day, each local municipality had to deal with issues ranging from repainting road markings to relocating bus stops and traffic lights, and redesigning intersections, bicycle lanes and one-way streets.
Several cities including Stockholm, Malmö and Helsingborg also used the change to implement more wide-ranging transport changes, such as closing tram lines to allow for more bus routes. Hundreds of new buses were purchased by municipalities around the country, and around 8,000 older buses were reconfigured to provide doors on both sides. The total cost of amending public transportation came in at 301,457,972 Swedish kronor.
Some 360,000 street signs had to be switched nationwide, which largely took place on a single day before the move to right-hand driving, with council workers joined by the military and working late into the night to ensure the task got done before H-Day formally revved into gear on Sunday morning. All but essential traffic was banned from the roads.
A new era
But as Dagen H finally dawned, the hard work all appeared to pay off. Swedes began cautiously driving on the right-hand side of roads around the country at precisely 5am on 3 September 1967, following a radio countdown.
Olof Palme, the Swedish Minister of Communication (who later became Prime Minister), went on air to say that the move represented “a very large change in our daily existence, our everyday life”.
“I dare say that never before has a country invested so much personal labour, and money, to achieve uniform international traffic rules,” he announced.
In total, the project cost 628 million kronor, just 5% over the government’s estimated budget two years earlier, and the equivalent of around 2.6 billion kronor ($316m) today.
But economic historian Lars Magnusson argues that this figure is actually relatively small, given the scale of the plan, which was the biggest infrastructure project Sweden had ever seen.
Crisis averted
In safety terms, the project was declared a success almost immediately. As Swedes began their working week on the day after H-Day, 157 minor traffic accidents were reported around the country, slightly less than average for a typical Monday. Nobody died.
A total of 1,077 people died and 21,001 were injured in 1967, the year of Dagen H, down from 1,313 and 23,618 respectively in 1965, which was largely considered to be a result of the extra caution taken by Swedes as a result of the switchover and the state’s nationwide campaign. It took another three years before accident and fatality rates returned to their original levels, during which time car ownership continued to increase rapidly across the country.
Future lessons
So could Sweden pull off anything like Dagen H today?
Recently ranked top in Europe in Bloomberg’s global innovation ranking, with a transport infrastructure quality above the EU average and one of the region’s strongest digital economies, the Nordic nation would certainly have a head start should it decide to embark on a similarly disruptive transportation project.
But the prevailing sentiment among those who’ve studied Dagen H closely is that today’s political, economic and media climates would present numerous fresh challenges to those that existed at the time Dagen H.
Peter Kronborg’s key argument is that ministers and public authorities would struggle to shift public opinion and shape a new consensus so dramatically. He says that “everything about Swedish society became a little more individualistic” just a year after Dagen H, in the wake of student radicalism and counter-culturism across Europe, and he believes that today the Swedish public would be outraged if politicians went ahead with a project so vehemently opposed in a referendum.
BBC
Its mission was to put Sweden on the same path as the rest of its continental European neighbours, most of which had long followed the global trend to drive cars on the right.
(The swapped direction of the blue arrow road sign became an iconic symbol for the Dagen H project (Credit: Jan Søndergaard) )
As well as hoping to boost the country’s international reputation, the Swedish government had grown increasingly concerned about safety, with the number of registered vehicles on the roads shooting up from 862,992 a decade earlier to a figure of 1,976,248 recorded by Statistics Sweden at the time of H-Day. Sweden’s population was around 7.8 million.
Despite driving on the left, many Swedes already owned cars with the steering wheel on the left-hand side of the vehicle, since many bought from abroad and major Swedish car manufacturers such as Volvo had chosen to follow the trend. However, there were concerns that this was a factor in rising numbers of fatal road traffic accidents, up from 595 in 1950 to 1,313 in 1966, alongside an increased frequency of collisions around Sweden’s borders with Denmark, Norway and Finland.
“The market for cars in Sweden was not so big and so we tended to buy left-driven cars,” explains Lars Magnusson, a professor in economic history at Uppsala University. “But that meant that you would be sitting on the opposite side to what made sense… and you were looking down into the ditch!”
‘Incredibly hard’
In the run-up to H-Day, each local municipality had to deal with issues ranging from repainting road markings to relocating bus stops and traffic lights, and redesigning intersections, bicycle lanes and one-way streets.
Several cities including Stockholm, Malmö and Helsingborg also used the change to implement more wide-ranging transport changes, such as closing tram lines to allow for more bus routes. Hundreds of new buses were purchased by municipalities around the country, and around 8,000 older buses were reconfigured to provide doors on both sides. The total cost of amending public transportation came in at 301,457,972 Swedish kronor.
Some 360,000 street signs had to be switched nationwide, which largely took place on a single day before the move to right-hand driving, with council workers joined by the military and working late into the night to ensure the task got done before H-Day formally revved into gear on Sunday morning. All but essential traffic was banned from the roads.
A new era
But as Dagen H finally dawned, the hard work all appeared to pay off. Swedes began cautiously driving on the right-hand side of roads around the country at precisely 5am on 3 September 1967, following a radio countdown.
Olof Palme, the Swedish Minister of Communication (who later became Prime Minister), went on air to say that the move represented “a very large change in our daily existence, our everyday life”.
“I dare say that never before has a country invested so much personal labour, and money, to achieve uniform international traffic rules,” he announced.
In total, the project cost 628 million kronor, just 5% over the government’s estimated budget two years earlier, and the equivalent of around 2.6 billion kronor ($316m) today.
But economic historian Lars Magnusson argues that this figure is actually relatively small, given the scale of the plan, which was the biggest infrastructure project Sweden had ever seen.
Crisis averted
In safety terms, the project was declared a success almost immediately. As Swedes began their working week on the day after H-Day, 157 minor traffic accidents were reported around the country, slightly less than average for a typical Monday. Nobody died.
A total of 1,077 people died and 21,001 were injured in 1967, the year of Dagen H, down from 1,313 and 23,618 respectively in 1965, which was largely considered to be a result of the extra caution taken by Swedes as a result of the switchover and the state’s nationwide campaign. It took another three years before accident and fatality rates returned to their original levels, during which time car ownership continued to increase rapidly across the country.
Future lessons
So could Sweden pull off anything like Dagen H today?
Recently ranked top in Europe in Bloomberg’s global innovation ranking, with a transport infrastructure quality above the EU average and one of the region’s strongest digital economies, the Nordic nation would certainly have a head start should it decide to embark on a similarly disruptive transportation project.
But the prevailing sentiment among those who’ve studied Dagen H closely is that today’s political, economic and media climates would present numerous fresh challenges to those that existed at the time Dagen H.
Peter Kronborg’s key argument is that ministers and public authorities would struggle to shift public opinion and shape a new consensus so dramatically. He says that “everything about Swedish society became a little more individualistic” just a year after Dagen H, in the wake of student radicalism and counter-culturism across Europe, and he believes that today the Swedish public would be outraged if politicians went ahead with a project so vehemently opposed in a referendum.
BBC
