Short Stuff: Dagen H

gota devita? Why did you say it for this show? It's just 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 uh teased out on an episode we did recently, and one that is

from an episode. Well it's not from an episode, but there's all so visible episode about this there is if you want to hear a better version in that way, right, Roman, Roman has this beaten just about every way, but we'll try our best. Right, So, what we're talking about today is called dogging h and dogging h um is Swedish for our day or right day h. The H stands for hougar, which is um, the Swedish word for right. And what the whole thing was really talking about was

something called man huger traffic calm log ningjin. 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 this, all these words and oom lots all piled together mean is that this is the day dogging h September three, ninety seven when Sweden said we're no longer driving on the left hand of the road like we have been since seventeen thirty four, where all of a sudden, on one day going to

switch over to the right hand side. That's right, And uh, I think did you mention when they how long they had been driving on the other side. Yes, it's seventeen thirty four. It's a long time. So what you're having

to do is there's a couple of factors here. You've got to 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, I know. It's definitely Sweden's largest infrastructure project to that day. It was the largest for for any country as far as traffics are related,

largest traffic related infrastructure. Yes, what I just said protect Okay, I just couldn't believe my ears chuck, but um, yeah, yeah. So yeah, there's an infrastructure section of it, and then there's the public information camp paint 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 other steps. How about that? And one some of the other things they did was, um, TV ads,

radio ads, newspaper ads. They came up with a logo for dogging age that was everywhere. Um. They had a a song contest to pick us a theme song for dog and h and they came up with a good Boy. I'm sure you listened to it. Yeah, it was good of you. Oh yeah. Uh. It was called well the American translation is keep to the Rights Vincente and it was by the Telestars and it was like you said, selected by a vote. It actually reached number five on

their their charts, whatever the Swedish charts are. Uh. And there was also a weird little sly side meeting 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 some. That's a deep cut right there. It's fairly deep. So then the name of the song in Swedish is

hall dig Tail Hougar Svenson. And um. I listened to it enough that I could have sung it, but enough time is the lap? Since I've heard it's gone? Can you say it 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 who go look it up on YouTube? Uh? No? I mean, let's could we play like a version where we won't get sued? Uh? I don't know. We'll find out in

the getit? How about that? All right? Well, let's play a little part right now here is hall dig Tail Huger Svenson by the Telestars. I'm not it's just bad about it. Catch is is it gets I'm surprised it only rose to number five on the Huge Parade. Yeah. Uh, here's the thing with h Day though, Um, you know, 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. That

pamphlet I mentioned. Uh, I want to 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. And then um, you've got uh, street signs, you've got bus stops, you've got traffic lights, you got bicycle lanes, you got one way streets, you got busses that have doors on one side of the vehicle that now need doors on the other side. It was huge. Yeah. What one of the other things too,

was the Swedes didn't even want to do this. There was a there was a referendum that had been held ten years before when they started thinking about doing this, and like of Swedish voters said no, Yeah, they did want to 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 um 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 want to look backwards or anything like that.

But then the other thing is that they 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 Volvos, 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 and and they ultimately did show a decline in traffic accidents and fatalities because of DOGG 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. Um, 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 three hundred and sixty thousand street signs in less than twenty four hours. Were they successful. We'll let you know right after this message breaks. Okay, Chuck,

I can't stand the tension any longer. Were they successful in changing three hundred and sixty thousand 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, okay, but over over, overall they were very successful. At four fifty in the a m on September, bunch 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 the other side and

said all right, have have a blast everybody. Yeah. There was like a countdown on the radio, and then there was the announcement after 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 like 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 um there were the next day that was a Sunday at like five am when they started, and the next the next business day, Monday. There were no fatalities. Nobody died and they were like a hundred and fifty seven car wrex, which is slightly lower than a normal Monday in Sweden. Yeah, and it was not cheap either. Obviously it's gonna cost a ton

of money. At the time it costs six million kroner, which was astronaut Yeah, it's about three and sixteen million American dollars today, but about five more than the government's estimated budget, which is not a bad overrun, No, not at all. And um, if you read some of the articles on it we we used, in addition to a couple of 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 point out like, dude, you that was ridiculously cheap, even for the time, for this, the massive scale of this, not just the infrastructure again but also the all of the public information campaign too. They they did it for cheap, and they did it really quickly. Yeah, it's 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, um after a couple of years when people got used to it, and so UM Sweden undertook a projects starting in that UM that said, we're we we don't want any traffic fatalities no matter what side of

the road we drive on, um, in our country. So they came up with a program called Vision Zero, and um, they've just been slowly but surely trying to whittle down the number of traffic fatalities and in two thousand and sixteen it was down to two hundred and seventy. 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 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, Yeah, I got nothing else except to recommend the 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 um, it's always you know, 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 uh, that's it for short stuff. Go ahead on over to nine Invisible and we will see you next time. How ddios Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radios how Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H