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Did the Anschluss Involve a Change of Road Directionality?

Reader Robin notes this in a comment in my previous post:

I remember as child in occupied Austria around 1946 being told that Austria was forcibly switched to RHD when Hitler annexed the country in 1938.

That’s a fascinating, creepy detail — does anyone have any documentation of its truth?

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Traffic Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Did the Anschluss Involve a Change of Road Directionality?”

  1. Stephen Lowke Says:
    August 14th, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    Tom, here is the result of a quick search:

    The break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire caused no change: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Hungary continued to drive on the left. Austria itself was something of a curiosity. Half the country drove on the left and half on the right. The dividing line was precisely the area affected by Napoleon’s conquests in 1805.
    When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler ordered that the traffic should change from the left to the right side of the road, overnight. The change threw the driving public into turmoil, because motorists were unable to see most road signs. In Vienna it proved impossible to change the trams overnight, so while all other traffic took to the right-hand side of the road, the trams continued to run on the left for several weeks. Czechoslovakia and Hungary, one of the last states on the mainland of Europe to keep left, changed to the right after being invaded by Germany in 1939.

    http://users.telenet.be/worldstandards/driving%20on%20the%20left.htm

    Steve

  2. HB - Amsterdam Says:
    August 16th, 2009 at 6:36 am

    Sweden switched from left to right in 1967: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

    Oddly enough they already had most cars with the steering wheel on the left.

  3. Bossi Says:
    August 17th, 2009 at 5:21 pm

    Wikipedia has a bit of info on Austria’s situation, too…
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic#Austria-Hungary

    Take its truthiness as you will, though most of the info in this article seems to be pretty accurate.

  4. Vratislav Filler Says:
    August 24th, 2009 at 12:46 pm

    In Czechoslovakia, the change of road directionality was under preparation before German invasion. It was planned for summer 1939 and only hastened by about two months.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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