An hour or two after traffic switched, TV broadcast from Svinesund, the biggest of the road crossings to Norway, and a major route for road haulage, and a reporter said something like "here we have the driver of a Norwegian 18-wheeler, <name>. Well, <name>, what do think of the big reform?" Norwegian, looking a little dense and speaking slowly: "Uh, what reform?" There was big signage everywhere. The reporter tried dropping a hint, the Norwegian truck driver refused to have noticed any change in the driving rules. Camera showed the very big 18-wheeler. The reporter dropped increasingly clearer hints and looked discomfited, the Norwegian still said "no, what reform, is anything new?" and eventually they cut the interview and switched back to the studio.
In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes.
One quip which did the rounds in the papers prior to the Swedes starting to drive on the right was that they would perform the switch in several phases - first heavy traffic, then cars a month later...
Also 83% is really a lot... While seemingly obviously correct now, the vast majority didn't see it that way then. I can only assume that If I was there I would be against it too.
Nowadays with mass media and powerful almost immediate public reaction to government, such "you'll thank me later" moves seem less likely, and arguably, we are worse off for it.
The problem isn't mass media, the problem is that they did use this card many times over the past decades to promote neoliberal policies, and in retrospect it's clear that nobody is thanking them.
The main lesson is that you can indeed force things on people, and when you do so for good reasons you'll be thanked later, but you must do it wisely and be sure that people will thank you, otherwise you're just destroying public's confidence in politicians (which doesn't matter to the neoliberals anyway, since they don't think State is a valuable institustion in the first place…)
The relatively smooth changeover saw a temporary reduction in the number of accidents... These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to "normal" over the next six weeks
Iceland saw a similar effect on "H-dagurinn" when they made the switch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dagurinn):
Traffic accident rates briefly dropped as drivers overcompensated for the increased risk from driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, before returning to the level following the trend prior to the changeover.
We had a good laugh and drove away from the airport. We soon discovered that the raised middle finger was international. :)
"Have you heared: Britain wants to switch to right-hand traffic?"
...
"Yes, but they want to do it step by step."
???
"They want to start with lorries first."
As a cyclist I wish we had the same rule where I live. Far too often a car parked on the street will not see me when they try to exit their spot, as it's only when half the front of the car is in the cycle lane they actually can see past the other car.
I believe many Norwegians have received parking tickets when visiting Sweden because if this difference. I wasn't aware of this myself until recently.
I did it the other day and it felt illegal.
It’s not something you will immediately notice by just looking at the road, you have to think of the full picture.
Imagine a fork vs a merge. You have buffer zones for off-ramps. Tight merges. Psychology of drivers. Reaction to signage. All this alters the flow of traffic and create undesired bottlenecks.
In the bigger cities you can still find a few examples of such originally left roads around, with less ideal flow. Usually around tunnels where rework is difficult.
In Stockholm, plans had been made as early as the 1940's to gradually replace the tram network with the metro, and that did in fact happen. Today's green and red metro lines do in fact use old tram line alignments to a pretty significant extent (the younger blue line was all new and mostly blasted out of the bedrock deep underground). In 1957 the city council formally decided that the tram networks should be gone by the mid-1970's, at which time most of the infrastructure and rolling stock would have been considered end-of-life. All H-day did was accelerate this by a couple of years. Two suburban lines were kept though and they survive to this day, but at least up until the 1990's their future was kind of uncertain. Things finally changed in the mid-90's, and new light rail alignments started to get built again.
I'd guess in London it's the opposite (has been a while, cannot remember).
This is probably why the adjustment was so smooth.
When you have two multi lane one way roads going opposite ways and want add a two-way connection between them then you often want to put lanes the opposite of normal way. Another example is all roads connecting Chiang Mai's old city outer and inner circle road. The country is left-handed but those connecting roads are right handed, the opposite of Stockholm intersection
“American territories are under American sovereignty and, consequently, may be treated as part of the United States proper in some ways and not others (i.e., territories belong to, but are not considered to be a part of, the United States). Unincorporated territories in particular are not considered to be integral parts of the United States, and the Constitution of the United States applies only partially in those territories.”
(This kind of stuff can be very convolutrd. There are parts of France that aren’t in the EU, for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_France: “Overseas France (French: France d'outre-mer, also France ultramarine)[note 3] consists of 13 French territories outside Europe, mostly the remains of the French colonial empire that remained a part of the French state under various statuses after decolonization. Most, but not all, are part of the European Union”)
They already used left-hand drive vehicles but rode on the left?? That's just ridiculous and obvious why they switched...
Driving on the right
Speaking English
The metric system
The 2024-06-09 date format
The Celsius scale
The 24-hour clockIf you mean teaching english as a second language, I can agree. If you mean switching over to it as the primary language I hard disagree.
It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language.
Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications.
Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
Driving on the left
Speaking creole
The metric system
The 09/06/2024 date format
The Kelvin scale
The french decimal time system
The AuthaGraph projectionMore people in India drive on the left than North America and Europe put together.
Nassim Taleb wrote about this in https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
Let's standardize that to the Newspeak version of English for clarity and to make hackers happy.
No daylight savings time
Seriously, I think the planet has bigger problems than discussing about DST.
On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
Did it happen last month?
Did it happen last year?
I feel like that's the order I ask questions if wonder when something happened.
That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
Up until WWII, a huge part of the scientific discourse was held in German. The language's relevance had waned a bit by 1933, but it was still a widely spoken and understood language in Europe, much more so than today.
Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
No thanks
> 2024-06-09 date format
That doesnt infer what you want. Are you saying you want YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM
Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
1970_01_01
2024_06_09
2024_12_31
16383_12_31
5 bits for DD [0, 31] + 4 bits for MM [0, 15] + 14 or more bits for year [0, 16_383] = 23 bits.
Some people just want to watch the world burn
We need to understand that the language you are able to think in - limits your thinking.
Some languages have things you cannot translate into English.
These non translateable concepts do not exist in the Western world view point.
To understand it you must know, on a deeper level why a Swede values things being lagom, and this is surprisingly hard to put into words because it involves history, language, value systems, social patterns and even concepts like gratitude towards simple things. This word encapsulates a really big aspect of Swedish culture, making it impossible to translate accurately.