Sweden changed sides; the buses changed walls

At 4:50 a.m. on September 3, 1967, vehicles on Swedish roads stopped. Drivers then moved carefully across the road and waited. At 5, Sweden began driving on the right.

This is the part preserved in photographs: an entire country performing a slow, supervised lane change. The National Library of Sweden’s sequence from Stockholm shows cars and buses crossing the centre line while police watch.

A car could make the switch by moving. A bus had a more structural problem. Under left-hand traffic, its passenger doors opened toward the left curb. On the new system those same doors would release passengers into moving traffic.

A contemporary trade report called bus conversion the most expensive part of the project. About 4,000 buses needed work, usually including new doors cut into the right side. Some types were too expensive to alter, so roughly 1,800 were to be replaced early.

The fleet could not be rebuilt on Saturday night. For more than two years, new buses designed for right-hand traffic had operated with an extra left-side door. In remote areas, some right-door-only buses were already in service before the switch. They discharged passengers in the road, protected by flashing red lights and a rule requiring other traffic to stop. Gothenburg ran 50 of them using special passenger refuges.

Then, at 5 a.m., the temporary door became the correct door.

Stockholm used the change to acquire buses from abroad. Its transport museum records that 200 Leyland Panthers entered service that morning. They were not converted during the pause. They had been waiting for the road system to match them.

The famous ten-minute manoeuvre was real, but it gives the reform an artificial neatness. Road markings and traffic rules can change at an appointed minute. A vehicle fleet changes through procurement schedules, workshops, premature retirements and several years in which a bus may need doors for both the country that exists and the one already on order.