Sten Skiöld was a week shy of 9 years old on “Högertrafikomläggningen” (right-hand traffic diversion) or H-Day, September 3, the momentous Sunday in 1967 when all the road traffic in Sweden halted a little before dawn. When it started up again, Sweden had gone from driving on the left to driving on the right.
Fifty years later, Skiöld may remember the whole thing particularly well—for about half his life, his father Lars had been the man in charge of the enormous undertaking. “We saw him more often on television than in real life,” he says. The nights he spent in hotels rather than at home added up to months, and by the end he was smoking 3 packets of cigarettes a day from the pressure, says his son.
The debate about making the change to right-hand traffic (RHT) had been going on for some time. In fact, King Charles XII initiated a short-lived RHT law soon after the Great Northern War, apparently to bring Sweden into conformity with her neighbors and make trade simpler. (He also tried to institute a fairly hefty tax on the wealthy, and after his death in 1718 both initiatives were rapidly scuttled.)
When the automobile came along the subject was raised from time to time; the pro argument holding that not only would it be safer for international travel but that driving on the left with left-side steering affected the driver’s ability to see well, especially when passing. (Ninety percent of Swedish cars had left-side steering at the time the law to change was finally passed.)
In 1955, a referendum on switching sides received a resounding “nej.” More than 80 percent of Swedish voters were against the change. But government officials continued to suspect RHT would be better, and in 1960 the government convened a commission to examine the desirability & feasibility of changing sides. When its final report recommended right-hand traffic, a bill was proposed in the national legislature, passing both chambers of the Riksdag by a large margin in spring 1963 and setting in motion an enormous project that would affect literally every Swedish citizen.
Sten Skiöld says that his father knew very well that information about H-day had to reach 100 percent of the population. “Not 99 percent, not 99.5 percent,” he emphasizes. “Not a single person could be left out, not one Swede could die from not knowing about the change.”
The big switch had been set for sometime in 1967, so the planners had four years to design one of the biggest logistical feats in recent memory. Sweden is an enormous country, the third largest in the EU. The H-Day plan had to go smoothly in every farming hamlet as well as in the cities. And Lars Skiöld and his colleagues at the Higher Traffic Commission (HTK), under then-Infrastructure minister Olof Palme, seem to have been able to combine highly challenging technical planning and logistical arrangement with a sort of imagination rare in such circles. They sent out pamphlets describing the new universal European signs that would go up, and they worked to plan where every one of those replacement signs should go.
Trams in a number of cities were already being phased out; the buses that were to replace them had to have new doors on the right, the most expensive single part of the H project. Some buses were retrofitted, others were sold or donated to LHT countries like Pakistan and Kenya. New traffic lights were mounted and then swathed in covers to avoid premature confusion.
Merchants offered a dashboard-mounted “course indicator” that would warn you if you were drifting too far left. Everyone put an H (höger, right) placard on his dashboard, and 1967 calendars had enormous red H-Day reminders on “Sunday September 3”. The most elegant aides-mémoire were leather driving gloves, red on the left and green on the right. They must have been far more effective than H-printed underpants, which presumably only worked as a reminder when one was nowhere near a road.
And in an inspired moment, the “Right-hand Traffic Commission” (HTK) held a song contest, for a jingle or novelty song to reinforce everyone’s consciousness of the coming change. The winner was, and is, a winner indeed; it could hardly be a catchier tune. “Håll Dig Till Hölger, Svensson!” (Keep to the right, Svensson!) performed by the Telstars, must have floated into the consciousness of that projected 100 percent—as I was researching this piece, everyone I spoke to sang me a chorus, and after I’d listened a couple of times I could sing it back.
Swedes remember the little details of the changeover time. Property developer and businessman Claes Kjellander was a 22-year-old student at the ancient university in Uppsala, who drove his father’s Volvo Amazon from time to time. He passed his driving test not very long before the swap, so he’s had the experience of driving on both sides. “You were very careful in the beginning,” after the change, he says. “Then as you became a bit more confident—that was actually the time you were most likely to forget and drift toward the left side of the road. But that didn’t last long, and eventually you just adapt entirely.”
People who were younger at the time have other memories.
Journalist and former Minister of Culture Cecilia Stegö Chilò waited impatiently to drive on the right. She didn’t have an auto though—her mother was keeping her first bicycle in the cellar, on the principle that it would be wiser not to have to unlearn cycling on the left. It was blue and snazzy, she says, “things you never forget.” Folklorist Dan Korn was only 5, but he remembers that the television was on in the morning reporting on the great day—at the time, Swedish television was not a 24-hour phenomenon, so this meant something important was happening.
Lisa Abramowicz was a high school exchange student in Flint, Michigan that year. She recalls being surprised that the change was covered in the American press. And Elsa Israeli was in Bournemouth, watching the change on television and defending it to her British friends who wanted to know why LHT wasn’t good enough for the Swedes!
The transition, begun in the small hours of Sunday morning, went very smoothly, and in the immediate aftermath and for some time, there was a decided drop in automobile accidents of all sorts and of fatalities. In fact, Sten Skiöld overheard his father Lars—the “commander general”—comment on the disappointment of the foreign press, which had bought up all the color film in Stockholm in hopes of snagging gory photos for the tabloids.
After H-Day, Skiöld tells me, his father took the family to Italy for a holiday. (One hopes he was spared a close look at Italian driving.) But success breeds success, and the following year he was asked to help design and oversee Iceland’s H-daggurin. A subsequent project was in the works, the daunting task of changing from left to right in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, all formerly British colonies. But then-Ugandan dictator Idi Amin would have none of it, according to Sten Skiöld. The project was never initiated, and all three countries still drive on the left.
As for Sten Skiöld, he’s always driven on the right. But he’s glad to be working at home in Uppsala these days instead of commuting to Stockholm, as he did for more than 20 years. “Rush hour gets to be too much eventually,” he says, “whichever side of the road you’re driving on.”
