Dagen H: the day Sweden switched from driving on the left to the right (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Dagen H: the day Sweden switched from driving on the left to the right (2018)

drivemag.com

95 pointsgscott53 comments

> The actual change took place at 4:50 AM and vehicles driving on the road at that time were instructed to change from right to left as they were driving.

This makes it sound haphazard. In practice, traffic stopped at 04:50, everyone had 10 minutes to carefully change side, and traffic resumed at 05:00. Also, all non-essential traffic was banned between 01:00 - 06:00.

Instead of a heavy-handed centralized government mandate like this they should have used a tax incentive to encourage people to drive on the other side.

This event is the perfect example of "heavy-handed" centralized government doing things right. In fact, I'm really scratching my head how you think it could be improved. edit: oh wait, this was sarcasm, right? Since obviously a tax incentive is a terrible tool for this. Sorry if I missed something.

It’s not your fault, Poe’s law strikes again. People are out there with pretty extreme beliefs about the power of tax cuts, so it’s hard to satirize them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Yeah, it was a joke about the limits of marginalism to solve coordination problems.

Let people drive where they want. Free market automotivity.

Dagen H is a good lesson for why incremental solutions to climate change aren’t enough. Sometimes you need to change a lot of stuff simultaneously and for that you need decisive coordinated action.

Across the bay we have some jokes about this. My favourite goes something like this:

The Swedes decided to make the switch gradual to make it easier to learn. Heavy trucks switched driving directions one week before rest of the traffic.

A couple of years before we had an election about what side to drive on. The right side actually lost the election. The politicians promptly (and legally) ignored it and went ahead anyhow. And that is a good thing.

Why have an election if there is no intention to respect the outcome?

So you don't end up with a Brexit situation on your hands.

Also a referendum that wasn't legally binding, oh well, we banned guns so had to find another way to shoot ourselves in the foot

Some referendums (most?) are advisory rather than directly legally binding. The intention of the lawmaker in situations like these could be e.g “there is a huge economic gain from driving on the same side as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, but if there is a massive opposition perhaps we can’t do it.” People are also prone to prefer the status quo , something which should perhaps be accounted for in decisions that will affect people many generations into the future.

Denmark also drove on the Left. They switched at the same time. I was there two weeks before it happened, but I was only 15 months old at the time.

All of the issues people that Direct Democracy has, or people perceive it to have. And presumably, since he said legally, there are rules they have to follow to not agree with the election.

That being said, like you I am curious for more details! It does seem a little strange on the face of it.

The outcome of an election is representation in parliament - which was clearly respected. Elections aren't a popularity vote.

That's a seriously fantastic point.

I think most voters in democratic systems conflate the two and miss this in it's entirety.

Yeah, Sweden has referendums, and we do one every 1-3 decades, but they're only "advisory".

Power rests 100% with parliament.

You ask "why?". It's a good question. The system is hard to defend logically, but it is respected nonetheless.

Look at the years-long Brexit saga for a good reason.

It's naive to assume referendums are inherently more democratic.

The Brexit situation is one good example why. They posed the wrong question and arrived at an answer the majority of both the voters and the parliament are already deeply unhappy with...

If I wanted to grab power and rule as a dictator, I would hold referendums every month. You just wouldn't like the questions or the rules...

Strictly speaking though, UK also only have advisory referendums. If parliament wanted to they could just ignore Brexit. Politically impossible even if legal, though.

The British parliament seems to be ignoring Brexit just fine, it's just that only the prime minister can stop it.

> It's naive to assume referendums are inherently more democratic.

I think they're more democratic, pretty much by definition.

The point you're making is that they're not good.

Democracy is not the dictatorship of the majority. All successful democratic constitutions limit what "a majority" can decide on.

To enhance democracy, referendums need certain precise conditions, which are hard or impractical to achieve. For example: Who decides what goes on the ballot?

What do you do if too many issues make it on the ballot, such that the voters and the election staff (or volunteers in most cases) get exhausted and can't effectively participate? How should campaign financing be controlled? How are democratic norms enforced against referendums if necessary?

Another interesting issue arises when voters decide on the rights of those who are not allowed to vote. Mostly immigrants today. But guess how Switzerland became the last democratic country in Western Europe to get full voting rights for women...

Looks like Sweden has never held a binding referendum. [1]

Firstly, the goal of a non-binding referendum is to gather public opinion.

Secondly, the outcome of the referendum was respected for 13 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Sweden#

My understanding of this from older relatives was that question divided within the parties of the Parlament. This is usually solved in Sweden by postpone until every party sorts out there own standing. However, if that isn’t successful we have a advisory referendum that commits to nothing but will break some party deadlocks.

> And that is a good thing.

Curious - why is Left Hand Traffic better than Right Hand Traffic?

I believe the parent post is saying that right-hand is better, but I'm curious on the question in either direction.

I assume you mean worse. Driving on the left was worse because the steering wheel was also on the left, reducing visibility. For some reason Swedish car manufacturers in the 60s, which was a big industry, didn't produce cars with the steering wheel on the right.

It's not intrinsically better, it's just a convention, but it helps if everyone operates to the same standard for obvious reasons. Since neighbouring countries drove on the right, it was better to adopt the same standard. This was not an issue for islands such as the UK and Japan with no direct road links to neighbours, therefore they still drive on the left. Originally, before cars, the nobility rode their horses on the left to defend against oncoming traffic since they held their swords in their right hand. For that reason, peasants travelled on the right for safety. After the French Revolution it was prudent for the nobility to blend in, hence all traffic began to travel on the right which was then spread by the French empire.

Side doesn't matter in itself, but all our neighbours drove on the right side, which in itself is a good enough reason to switch.

There were (are) roads that wound across the Norwegian border and back again ....

why is it a good thing? driving on the left is better

Utterly marginally, and 80% of the world drives on the right now. Driving on the left is going to lose eventually.

I'm pretty sure that the last country to change what side of the road it drives on decided to switch to driving on the left ....

No, because India drives on the Left. That's a sixth of the world's population just in that country alone. Then Japan, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, etc.

just cause more people do it doesn't mean its better. My original question was trying to understand the reasoning behind the claim that right side is better.

Just a fun fact: my father had to go to the hospital by ambulance that day to take out his appendicitis. So for my own sake I'm glad it was so well planned!

In Finland there was a joke that in Sweden they changed from driving on the left to the right by steps. Trucks and other heavy vehicles changed first and others one year afterwards.

That's a funny joke. It reminds me of how Sweden actually tried changing to the Gregorian calendar in steps, by skipping leap days for 40 years. Yes, that would make the Swedish calendar to be different from the rest of the world for four decades and the difference to the other world calendars would be changing every four years...

It did not go according to plan. But it's the reason February of 1712 in the Swedish calendar did have 30 days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar

Funny, I heard the same story in Norway so it must be realnews.

Incredible episode about this from 99% Invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/h-day/

A TV station commissioned a song contest for a jingle for Dagen H. Here's the (very catchy) winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ODZtwkBYPs

Never heard of this, but my last name (and my dad's) is Svensson. Will tell him this next time I'm in the car with him on the highway and he's driving in the left lane, and see if he gets the reference.

The (2018) in the title makes it seem like this happened just last year. The article describing it is from last year. Dagen H was in 1968.

I found this really intriguing, and unfortunately can't understand the linked video in Swedish, but I'm really confused about how they did this with the huge amount of physical infrastructure that would have needed to change. After all, there are a lot of road features (e.g. many styles of ramps and turn lanes) that aren't symmetrical, so switching sides would have required a ton of construction. How did they accomplish this so quickly?

It took three years of planning to accomplish. Plus it was in the 1960s when there were fewer and slower cars, fewer motorways and generally fewer explicit markings.

They were remarkably clever to realize that they needed to switch before building motorways for several decades. The costs weren’t astronomical but today they would have been.

You have received replies already, but there are at least some pieces of non symmetrical infrastructure from that era that remain.

I live in Gothenburg, where trams are still one of the major forms of public transportation. There's at least one (presumably more) stop where the trams turn around that's quite inconvenient because it's built for left side driving:

https://www.google.com/maps/@57.6780363,12.0042818,149m/data...

If you want to board a tram that's turned there and will go back north, you can't do so at the platform where passengers usually wait. You have to cross the street, since the tracks actually don't connect to the main route until after the regular passenger platform.

All in all, things like that are quite rare. I guess a lot of our infrastructure - particularly highways, was built after the switch.

Buses, trams etc. would also have the doors on the wrong side, so cannot just switch side one day without any planning.

And indeed, the article tells that they had to replace their trams by buses with the right doors (pun intended) in some major cities, presumably until they could fix the trams.

What actually happened in most cities was that the trams were shut down, which was really unfortunate with hindsight.

Too bad the others didn’t follow suit. Just dangerous having two sides to drive.

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