Switch to the Right

Everyone in Stockholm seemed to have set his alarm clock to sound off be fore dawn. By 4 a.m., cars, motor scooters and flower-decked taxis that had been hired months before streamed downtown to the Kungsgatan, the city's main street. There they waited through a solemn radio countdown. At the stroke of five, loudspeakers blared: "Now is the time to change over." In a brief but monumental traffic jam, Sweden switched to the right side of the road.

The big change was a long time coming. For decades, while the rest of Europe standardized driving on the right, Sweden, like Britain, Ireland and Iceland, clung stubbornly to the left--an arbitrary attitude that dated back to an 18th century royal decree for mail coaches. But despite tradition, Swedes could hardly help noticing that neither their own motoring reflexes nor those of visitors from right-hand countries changed at the border. Foreigners kept getting into dangerous difficulties on Swedish roads, and the travel prone Swedes were getting into too many needless accidents abroad. Besides, driving Swedish cars in Sweden was a problem in itself. Because the first cars in Sweden were left-hand-drive imports, Swedish automakers also put left-hand steering in all their cars. Pulling out from a left lane to pass another car was something of a perilous adventure.

Run on Shorts. Once Parliament decided to switch, Swedish bureaucracy mobilized with terrifying efficiency. Psychologists made studies of drivers and pedestrians; traffic engineers surveyed Sweden's 70,000 miles of roadway from Malmo to remotest Lapland. Thousands of new signs and traffic lights were ordered and every home, hospital and prison received manuals detailing the 107 basic European road symbols that would replace the helter-skelter Swedish markers. To make sure foreign workers and visitors got the message, the Commission on Right-Hand Traffic printed pamphlets in nine languages from Portuguese to Serbo-Croatian.

In the final, frenetic days before H-day (after hoeger, the Swedish word for right), the new system was explained in the press, demonstrated on film, discussed on radio and TV, and extolled by singing commercials. Stockholm's N.K. department store reported a run on men's shorts emblazoned with a big H, and milk containers sprouted slogans such as "Smile a little in the right-hand traffic. We are all beginners."

For all the predictions of mayhem on the highway on H-day, the elaborate preparations were well worth the $120 million that they cost motorists in special taxes. Aside from a few bent fenders and dented egos, the change was, in fact, so bloodless that two days passed before Sweden reported a single traffic fatality.

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