Centerline: The Surprising History of Lane Markings

when Americans first started driving automobiles we really hadn't set up rules or laws to operate the things safely in fact for most of many decades there wasn't even a line down the center of the road to delineate the lanes in the fall of 1917 dr. Judah McCarroll was driving her Ford Model T down the road near Indio California when she was run off the road by a truck she later said of the event by Model T Ford and I found ourselves face-to-face with the truck on a paved highway it didn't take me long to choose between the Sandy birth to the right and the 10-ton truck to the left and that's when I had my idea pending a white line down the center of the highways of the country as a safety measure the California Department of Transportation credits dr. McCarroll with the idea of painting a central line but she wasn't actually the first have that idea you know today that line down the middle of the hundreds of thousands of miles of roads around the world this is so common to make such common sense it's hard to imagine roads without them but the history of delineating lanes on roads is actually surprising and it deserves to be remembered there are some early examples of lane marking well Jubilee years years of forgiveness are mentioned in the Bible chapter of Leviticus the tradition in the Western Catholic Church was started by Pope Boniface the 8th in 1300 ad so many people as many as 200,000 came to Rome for the event that Boniface had a continuous line handed down the middle of each road in Rome to help manage the crowds the line did not however denote the direction of traffic but the type horses and carts would be on one side foot traffic on the other in 1600 ad a road near Mexico City used lighter colored stones to denote a central line markings of a centerline were used sporadically on bridges in the US and elsewhere in the 19th century New York City was using payment lines to mark crosswalks as early as 1911 conventions for the direction of travel developed with time and were largely set by the 19th century although the world still not come to an agreement whether traffic should move to the left or to the right early traffic tended to have the traveler on the left a tradition possibly derived so that your sword hand would face the road in case the person on the other side an enemy America took the convention of traffic moving on the right a tradition which developed in the 18th century to make it easier to pass large agricultural wagons where the driver would control the horse team from the left rear horse leaving his right hand free to control the whip it was easier for the driver to see that he was clearing traffic that was passing to his left keep to the right laws were passed in both France in the United States in 1790 to England however continued the tradition of traffic moving on the left which was codified in the Highway Act of 1835 and is still followed in most of the former British Empire but roads for the most part still did not have marked lanes with the advent of the automobile when greater speeds made the need for such markings more apparent somewhat surprisingly the move to mark those lanes appear to originate in the United States Americans were actually slow to join the auto boom the first patent of a two-stroke engine in the US didn't come until 1895 and Henry Ford's first car the four wheeled Ford quadricycle followed in 1896 up until 1904 the majority of cars built in the world were built in Europe but by 1907 American production had grown to outpace European production and Ford was about to change the game turn his attention to the problem of production Ford instituted the moving assembly line in 1913 his innovation meant that cars that used to take 12 man hours to build can now be built in less than 90 man minutes the reason that the Model T was any color as long as it is black was because the fastest drying paint was black and then the other color would have slowed production cars became a sensation in the States between 1907 and 1917 they essentially replaced horses and carriages as the primary mode of transportation a transition that was so quick that it outpaced society's ability to adjust in 1910 there were only 5 cars per 1000 people in the United States but by 1920 that number had increased 17 fold to 86 per 1000 there were some unique circumstances led to America's past adoption of the motor vehicle perhaps most importantly the industrializing country was huge large distances often need to be covered for business or pleasure which made the advantage of a relatively expensive purchase greater than it was in Europe another advantage was growing wages partial encouraged by Henry Ford's instituting and audacious $5 a day wage and the dramatic drop in prices for cars in the early 20th century when the Model T was introduced in 1908 it sold for eight hundred twenty-five dollars by 1912 the Model T runabout sold for five hundred twenty-five dollars less than the average annual income in America and the price continued to drop to a mere $290 in 1927 cars became ubiquitous very soon after they were introduced they became faster and faster and paved road rates proliferated and attempt to keep up by 1918 there are over 10,000 motor vehicle deaths in the u.s. a year as with many innovations safety precautions and law systems were so to keep up with the pace of technological change it took a single decade for cars to become the primary mode of transportation in the United States and the speeds men can now go with ease produce problems that had never been considered properly in 1901 Connecticut became the first state in the country to institute a speed limit on motor vehicles twelve miles an hour in town 50 miles an hour on rural roads cars could go much faster than that in 1911 a world-record have been set by Bob Berman at Daytona Beach by going 141 miles an hour but most cars couldn't go that fast they had turned trips that took days in a matter of mere hours one of the greatest challenges was lanes with wagons and carriages muddy roads developed ruts that were easy to follow and while accidents were not trivial they moved slowly enough that it was comparatively simple to avoid someone else on the road like dr. McCarroll in California many people were unauthorized vehicles barreling toward them on unmarked roads and around blind corners while there is some disagreement the first appearance of lane markings in the US has been traced to Michigan according to the Michigan Department of Transportation the first line was painted in 1911 on River Road in Wayne County Michigan put there at the instigation of Edward in hinds Edward was a major innovator in Road Safety spearheading the good roads organization to improve public roads in Michigan in the 1890s I also built the first stretch of concrete road in the world in 1909 and served on the Wayne County Board of roads was created in 1906 alongside Henry Ford himself he is generally recognized as one of the most significant figures in the designing of roads and won several awards to that fact after his death Heinz was said to have the original idea of pinning a line down the middle of the road when he saw a milk truck go by that was leaking milk and thus leaving a white line behind him as it passed and while the idea has become sense a bedrock of traffic control took some time for it to catch on nationally in 1917 in addition to dr. McCarroll said what other people had the idea to paint lines apparently independently of one another in three different states in Michigan Kenneth Ingalls Sawyer's engineer superintendent of Marquette County painted a white center line along a Deadman's curve in Oregon deputy sheriff Peter Rexford came up with the idea walk on a bus driving on a dark rainy night the county refused to fund the project so chief deputy Martin Pratt paid for the paint that was later painted on the Columbia River Highway between Crown Point and Multnomah Falls in April 1917 it was later that fall that dr. McCarroll was run off the road near Indio California dr. McCarroll holds unique place in the story however because her work went beyond just coming up with the idea when the local Chamber of Commerce was uninterested in her plan McCarroll painted the line herself she instigated a letter-writing campaign that would help convince the state of California to adopt the measure universally in November 1924 and the state highway commission painted the lines but at the time there were few if any standards are guiding principles for markings and where those standards or guiding principles did exist they were on a local level there was no coordination between local agencies the process for standardizing markers took time in January 1927 the American Association of State Highway officials published a manual and specifications for the manufacturer display an erection of US standard Road markers and signs while this manual was the first national manual on traffic control devices it addressed only signs in rural areas and did not address pavement markings in 1930 the National Conference on street and highway safety published a manual on street traffic signs signals and markings the manual recommended that lane markings in a number of cases for example on curves of less than 600 foot radius and also at Hillcrest with view ahead is insufficient from it overtaking the passing in safety central lines were also recommended on streets with high traffic both directions and streets wide enough to have more than one lane either direction lines were recommended to be at least 4 inches wide and be white or yellow on bituminous pavement and black or white on concrete the use of black lane markings became less popular during the Second World War when black markings could not be seen while driving under blackout conditions the use of broken lines denote places where lane changing is permitted was not defined until a new manner was produced in 1948 the original purpose of the dashed lines was to save cost by reducing the amount of paint needed to mark lanes the length of the lines and gaps was not defined but the manual said it should be well proportioned the manual further noted that on rural highways a commonly used standard of 15 foot segments with 25 gaps was normal no national standard was adopted until 1978 research shows that people tend to underestimate the length of the broken lines with people surveyed most commonly assuming that the lines are 2 feet long with equal gaps in between in fact since 1978 the broken lines in the US are standardized to be 10 feet long with a 30 foot gap in between thus every time your car passes a new dashed line is traveled 40 feet far further than most people assume for years states had local rules for what colors of paint to use on the roads for different purposes and especially heated with the debate between whether white or yellow paint should be used to divide highways by November 1954 43 years after the first central line was painted 47 of the then 48 states had decided to use white as the dividing line and Oregon the last state capitulated later that year in 1958 the interstate US Bureau of Public Roads adopted white lines to divide lanes but in 1971 the Federal Highway Administration required now that all center lines on two-way roads be painted yellow while white central lines are used to demarcate lanes of traffic going in the same direction the now-familiar system that we use today it took some time for other nations to adopt the painting of a centerline lane marker actually most countries didn't embrace automobiles like the United States did until after the Second World War but by the 1950s automobiles were growing in popularity worldwide and most nations came up with some system of painting a centerline that's fairly similar to what we've come up with in the United States new technologies can often upset the social order take a while develop the the rules of the laws needed to manage that technology it can take a surprising amount of time to even do the obvious it could even take a surprising amount of time for the obvious to become obvious but the history of painting centerline Road markers tells us that a few people with a good idea willing to make a small change could make well a large difference today both Edward Hines and Kenneth Ingalls Sawyer are in the Michigan Transportation Hall of Honor and the section of road on which dr. McCarroll first painted her white line is now named in her honor the dr. June mccarroll Memorial freeway I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets have forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long and if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on facebook instagram twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history all you need to do you subscribe [Music]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 965,513

Keywords: history, the history guy, history guy, automotive history, highways, transportation, us history

Id: 9KYBaoNPNgA

Length: 12min 47sec (767 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/EntroperZero]

Fun fact, thanks to the now-standardized lengths of dashed lines, you can estimate your speed (in MPH) to within 3% by counting the number of dashed lines you pass in 33 seconds.

[u/N546RV]

Keep meaning to watch this - I love the History Guy.