A ‘thrilling’ mission to get the Swedish to change overnight | Hacker News Reader

A ‘thrilling’ mission to get the Swedish to change overnight

bbc.com

106 pointsdsr1238 comments

Okinawa switched back to driving on the left in 1978 shortly after the end of US occupation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/730_(transport) .

> A ‘thrilling’ mission to get the Swedish to change overnight (bbc.com)

Can we get an anti-clickbait headline policy? This was fifty years ago too.

We have one.

> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sadly it does crap all when the original headline is already clickbait...

Policy is, you are supposed to use the sub-heading, or even words from the first paragraph in those cases.

Original title is definitely linkbait and so I would say it warrants some kind of prefix like "H-Day 1967: A ‘thrilling’ mission to get the Swedish to change overnight".

It's a great story worthy of HN for anyone who hasn't already read about it elsewhere; the prefix is enough to let those of us already familiar with the story decide whether we can be bothered to click through to see if this article adds any new insight.

I'd also mention what was supposed to change.

It's a quote of someone describing how it felt then. Not the usual clickbait where the "thrilling" would just have been added by the headline writer.

It's in quotes. Chill out.

More recently, Samoa switched from driving on the right to driving on the left.

This change was so that they would be able to import cheaper Japanese used cars.

Probably used cars from New Zealand.

The reason they switched is that New Zealand dominates the south pacific as both the largest donor of aid and also the biggest trading partner to most of the pacific countries.

Do you have a source on that? All sources I can find show Australia providing about 5 times the aid as NZ. About what you'd expect given respective populations.

MFAT doesn't appear to support your claims. https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/countries-and-regions/pacific/#T...

I don't have the numbers of total contributions, Samoa was historically an NZ protectorate and there are 144,000 Samoans who live in NZ who send a big chunk of their pay checks home, they also send a lot of money back to Samoa through the Samoan church groups.

I tried to find the information on the total flow of money from NZ to Samoa but the only things that I could find was the official government aid of $22.3 million, which compares to $35.8 million from Australia, but the aid from private citizens would be massive.

Auckland has the largest Polynesian population in the world and for quite a few pacific islands more of their citizens live in Auckland then back in their homelands, people are expected to come here and work and send all of their spare money back home.

I suspect not.

About 60% of cars imported into New Zealand are used cars, and New Zealand doesn't manufacture any cars. By the time a car has finished its life in New Zealand, it ends up on a scrapheap. There is no appreciable car export industry in NZ.

If you Google search for "Car imports Samoa", the first page is entirely websites exporting cars from Japan.

Last year I visited Armenia where they also import a lot of second hand Japanese cars. I found this suprising as they drive on the right, and due to their proximity to Europe, I assumed importing cars from there would be a lot cheaper.

Does anyone know why this is the case?

Extraordinary volume in the sub $35,000 bracket.

Europe's auto money makers are Germany's ~$35,000+ vehicles from BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi.

Toyota, Honda, Hyundai (SK), Mazda, Suzuki, Kia (SK) and Nissan combined dominate the mid cost or lower vehicle category at massive scale. Volkswagen has been battling Toyota for the total sales crown, however Asia has a bunch of other companies competing at high scale in that bracket as well. I don't know what the volume comes out to, but I wouldn't be surprised if Asia is selling more than 2/3 of all cars in that segment globally.

Japan has very strict inspection rules on older cars, probably to boost car manufacturers.

And yet when I ask my fellow Swedes to get rid of daylight savings I hear "it would never work, you just can't make people switch habits like that overnight" way too often.

The inertia of complacency is very hard to change through grass roots movements, a big government decision like this is what's needed. Sweden voted against changing to right hand side when there was a referendum about it so the government had to force it.

> "it would never work, you just can't make people switch habits like that overnight"

What? The habit of changing the clocks twice a year?

> "it would never work, you just can't make people switch habits like that overnight"

Heh, isn't switching habits overnight literally what daylight savings time is? To avoid all the problems what we need is for everyone to stop changing overnight.

I also head comments like that. I'm not sure what they think happened a hundred years ago when this was implemented, or why our digital signage, real-time communication networks, and mobile phones would make such an implementation harder than it was then...

My dad got his license the week before this happened. He remembers it not being too difficult to relearn, but that the most impressive part of it was the sign reworks, ostensibly overnight, which seems corroborated by the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

I feel like once a year something about this gets posted to HN.

OP was just one of today's lucky 10,000: https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

First time I've seen it.

I first yeard about this thriugh 99% Invisible Podcast.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/h-day/

Its a great listen if anyone is interested more about the 'H-Day' switchover.

Samoa did it in 2009 to switch from driving on the right to driving on the left.

I was there, though as I was only 18 months old I don't remember it.

This is such an inspiring story! We need something along those lines to changes two things Americans continue doing in isolation and against the rest of the world: tipping and circumcision :)

Imperial system.

Logged in just to say the same. Metric system for life.

America uses the US Customary "system" - it's similar to Imperial, but some of the liquid measurements are different.

Do the other countries driving on the left need to switch, too? Or is the problem the Swedes had (lots of cars with left-hand drive) unique?

It would be unique because Sweden are attached to a continent where everyone drives on the other side of the road.

The other left hand sided driving countries are normally either in clusters together or are isolated by water and so don't have cars crossing the border.

Interestingly in the far east of Russia they get a lot of cars imported from Japan so the steering wheel is on the right hand side so they have the opposite problem.

No country really needs to switch — it's a matter of comparing costs versus benefits. There is some evidence that left hand traffic is safer despite being less common.

I don't think the world will ever be all one direction: the cost of changing the larger countries (China, India, Japan, the US) over would prohibit a mass change either way.

I'm pretty sure every country with a Jewish or Muslim population practices male circumcision, at least.

I pretty sure he's referring to this "hospital circumcision rates declined in the United States: from 64.5% in 1979 to 58.3% in 2010."[1]. So that implies at least 58% of newborns in a hospital are circumcised. Not a statistician or a census bureau employee but I'm pretty sure the US doesn't have >50% practicing Jewish + Muslim folks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision#Uni...

The change was which side of the road they drive on.

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