This is what Kungsgatan looked like on Sunday morning, the 3rd of September 1967. You may be wondering why. This was a special day in Swedish modern history - the day when traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right. It is known as the H-Day (Dagen H) - “H” stands for “Högertrafik”, the Swedish word for “right traffic”.
It all happened overnight across the whole country. On Sunday night all roads were closed for non-essential traffic 01:00 to 06:00. Any vehicles that needed to be on the roads during that time had to come to a complete stop at 04:50, then slowly change to the right side of the road and stop again until 05:00 to give others time to safely switch sides. In Stockholm the ban was longer – from 10:00 on Saturday until 15:00 on Sunday - to allow work crews to reconfigure intersections. The change may have happened overnight, but the preparations took weeks. Every intersection was equipped with an extra set of poles and traffic signals wrapped in black plastic. A parallel set of lines was painted on the roads with white paint, then covered with black tape. The plastic and the tape had to be removed before the traffic could be resumed. In Stockholm alone, about 20,000 signs had to be removed or replaced.
The changeover went quite smoothly with no increase in the number of accidents. On the day of the change, only 157 minor accidents were reported, of which only 32 involved personal injuries, with only a low number being serious.
