Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Dagen H

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

One day in 1967, Sweden changed what side of the road its citizens drive on. It went surprisingly well, considering. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Inagata DeVita, everybody, and welcome to the short stuff. It's Josh and Chuck, and there's Jerry over there, somewhere out there in the ether, right?

I hope so. And this is stuff you should know, short stuff. We should probably stop horsing around. Yeah, so I don't know why you said Inagata DeVita. I'm assuming, is that Swedish? 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 Inagata DeVita. Why did you say it for this show? No, it's just for 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 about a pretty interesting thing that you teased out on an episode we did recently,

and one that is from an episode, well, this is not from an episode, but there's also a 99% invisible episode about this. Yep, there is. If you wanna hear a better version, just tune into that one. Right, Roman has this beaten just about every way, but we'll try our best, right?

Agreed. So what we're talking about today is called Dagen H, and Dagen H is Swedish for our day or right day. The H stands for huger, which is the Swedish word for right, and what the whole thing was really talking about was something called, oh man, hugertrafikomlagningen.

Nice. 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 these words and umlats all piled together mean is that this is the day Dagen H, September 3rd, 1967, when Sweden said we're no longer driving

on the left hand of the road, like we have been since 1734, we're all of a sudden on one day going to switch over to the right hand side. That's right, and I think did you mention how long they had been driving on the other side? Yeah, since 1734. It's a long time.

So what you're having to do is, there's a couple of factors here. You've gotta 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 by any country.

Oh really? No, it's definitely Sweden's largest infrastructure project to that day. It was the largest for any country as far as traffic's related? Largest traffic related infrastructure? Yes, what I just said. Okay, I just couldn't believe my ears, Chuck.

But yeah, so yeah, there's the infrastructure section of it, and then there's the public information campaign, 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 of other steps. How about that? And some of the other things they did was

TV ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, they came up with a logo for Dog and H that was everywhere. They had a song contest to pick a theme song for Dog and H, and they came up with the good one. I'm sure you listened to it. Yeah, it was good of you. Oh yeah, it was called,

well, the American translation is keep to the rights, Vincent. I love the Swedes. And it was by the Telestars, and it was, like you said, selected by a vote. It actually reached number five on their charts, whatever the Swedish charts are. And there was also a weird little sly side meaning,

because apparently keeping it to the right means to be faithful to your significant other, as opposed to cheating on some, which is going left. Oh, I hadn't heard that before. Yeah. Wow, Chuck, that's a deep cut right there. It's fairly deep. So the name of the song in Swedish is

Halldig till Hoogers, Vincent. And I listened to it enough that I could have sung it, but enough time has elapsed since I've heard it. It's already gone. Can you sing it? That 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 to go look it up on YouTube? No, I mean, could we play like a version where we won't get sued? I don't know, we'll find out in the edit. How about that? All right, well, let's play a little part right now.

Here is Halldig till Hoogers, Vincent, by the Telestars. I hold it till Hoogers, Vincent. I hold it till Hoogers, and I'll slew none of them. It's just about as catchy as it gets. I'm surprised it only rose to number five on the huge parade. Yeah, here's the thing with H-Day, though. 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 I mentioned, I wanna make it clear, 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. Oh, gotcha, yeah. And then you've got street signs, you've got bus stops, you've got traffic lights,

you've got bicycle lanes, you've got one-way streets, you've got buses that have doors on one side of the vehicle that now need doors on the other side. It was huge. Yeah, one of the other things, too, was that the Swedes didn't even wanna do this. Not at all. There was a referendum that had been held 10 years before

when they started thinking about doing this. And like 83% of Swedish voters said no. They did not wanna start driving on the right-hand side of the road. And the government said, well, we're doing it anyway. And the reason why they wanted to do this in the first place was because Sweden was 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 wanna look backwards or anything like that. But then the other thing is that the government was like, this may cause fewer fatalities

because while we drive on the left side of the road, we're buying cars, including Volvo's, 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 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 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 they ultimately did show a decline in traffic accidents and fatalities because of Dog and H,

but they think it was because people were just paying more attention, getting used to driving on the 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. Yeah. 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 special permissions to have a car on the road at all. And they had to change 360,000 street signs

in less than 24 hours. Were they successful? We'll let you know right after this message break. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. OK, Chuck, I can't stay on the tension any longer. Were they successful in changing 360,000 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. OK. But overall, they were very successful at 4.50 in the AM on September 3rd, 1967. A 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 to the other side and said, all right, have a blast, everybody. Yeah, there was like a countdown on the radio. And then there was the announcement after they reached one that Sweden now drives on the right hand side of the road. And everybody could start driving. And I'm sure they were 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 the next day, that was a Sunday at like 5 AM when they started. And the next business day, Monday, there were no fatalities. Nobody died. And there were like 157 car wrecks,

which is slightly lower than a normal Monday in Sweden. Yeah, and it was not cheap either, obviously. This is going to cost a ton of money at the time. It cost $628 million, Kroner, which was astronomical. Yeah, it's about $316 million American dollars today, but about 5% more than the government's estimated budget, which is not a bad overrun. No, not at all.

And if you read some of the articles on it, we used, in addition to a couple 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, pointed out, like, dude, that was ridiculously cheap, even for the time for the massive scale of this. Not just the infrastructure, again,

but also all of the public information campaign, too. They did it for cheap, and they did it really quickly. Yeah, it was quite a project. My hat is off to them for doing it by all accounts, like pretty successfully. Yeah, they did it, and they said, that's great, but then, like I said, traffic fatalities went back up after a couple of years

when people got used to it. And so, Sweden undertook a project starting in 1997 that said, we don't want any traffic fatalities, no matter what side of the road we drive on in our country. So they came up with a program called Vision Zero, and they've just been slowly but surely trying to whittle down the number of traffic fatalities. And in 2016, it was down to 270.

That's awesome. 270. That's a minuscule amount for a country the size of Sweden for an entire year. So who knows if they'll ever get to zero, but hats off to them for also 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. I got nothing else except to recommend the 99% 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 it's always 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 that's it for short stuff. Go head on over to 99% Invisible, and we will see you next time. Adios. The stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.