Centerline: The Surprising History of Lane Markings

On this episode of Our American Stories, when it comes to infrastructure that helps keep us safe while we drive, perhaps the greatest cost to benefit ratio on the saving lives front has to be painted lane lines on roads.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue here with our American stories. And our
next story comes to us from a man whose YouTube
videos are followed by hundreds of thousands of viewers of
all ages. He's known simply as the History Guy. And
we spend a lot of time telling stories about the past.
And that's every kind of story about the past, because
if you don't know who you are, well you can't

(00:32):
know who you're going to be. And so much of
the story of who we are is the story of
the past. And so that's why we spend a lot
of time on history. So here's the History Guy with
the story he calls centerline, the surprising history of lane marking.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
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 In
the fall of nineteen seventeen, doctor June McCarroll was driving
her Ford Model T down the road near Indio, California,
when she was run off the road by a truck.

(01:10):
She later said of the event, by Model T Ford
and I found ourselves face to face with a truck
on a paved highway, and didn't take me long to
choose between the sandy berth to the right and the
ten 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 doctor Mcaroll with the

(01:32):
idea of painting a center line, but she wasn't actually
the first to have that idea. You know today that
lying down the middle of the hundreds of thousands of
miles of roads around the world is so common it
makes such common sense it's hard to imagine roads without them.
But the history of delineating lanes on roads is actually surprising,

(01:53):
and it deserves to be remembered. There are some early
examples of lanemarking well years years of forgiveness or mentioned
in the Bible chapter of Leviticus. The tradition in the
Western Catholic Church was started by Pope Boniface the Eighth
in thirteen hundred AD. So many people as many as
two hundred thousand came to Rome for the event that

(02:14):
Boniface had a continuous line painted 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 sixteen hundred, A d
a road near Mexico City used lighter colored stones to
denote a central line. Markings of a central line were

(02:34):
used sporadically on bridges in the US and elsewhere in
the nineteenth century. New York City was using pavement lines
to mark crosswalks as early as nineteen eleven. Conventions for
the direction of travel developed with time and were largely
set by the nineteenth 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

(02:55):
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 was an enemy. America
took the convention of traffic moving on the right, a
tradition which developed in the eighteenth century to make it
easier to pass large agricultural wagons, where the driver would
control the horse team from the left rear horse, leaving

(03:15):
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 and the United
States in seventeen ninety two. England, however, continued the tradition
of traffic moving on the left, which was codified in
the Highway Act of eighteen thirty five and has still

(03:36):
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 appeared to originate in the
United States. Cars became a sensation in the States between

(03:56):
nineteen oh seven and nineteen seventeen. They centially replaced horses
and carriages as the primary mode of transportation, a transition
that was so quick that it outpaid society's ability to adjust.
In nineteen ten, there were only five cars per one
thousand people in the United States, but by nineteen twenty
that number had increased seventeen fold to eighty six per

(04:17):
one thousand. When the Model T was introduced in nineteen
oh eight. It sold for eight hundred twenty five dollars.
By nineteen twelve, 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 two hundred ninety dollars in nineteen twenty seven. Cars
became ubiquitous very soon after they were introduced. They became

(04:38):
faster and faster, and paved road rates proliferated in an
attempt to keep up. By nineteen eighteen, there were over
ten thousand motor vehicle deaths in the US a year.
As with many innovations, safety precautions and loss 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

(05:00):
speed's men could now go with ease produce problems that
had never been considered properly. In nineteen oh one, Connecticut
became the first state in the country to institute a
speed limit on motor vehicles twelve miles an hour in town,
fifteen miles an hour on rural roads. Cars could go
much faster than that. In nineteen eleven, a world record
had been set by Bob Berman at Daytona Beach by

(05:21):
going one hundred and forty one miles an hour. While
most cars couldn't go that fast, they had turned trips
that took days into 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 most slowly enough that
it was comparatively simple to avoid someone else on the road.

(05:43):
While there is some disagreement, the first appearance of lanemarkings
in the US has been traced to Michigan. According to
the Michigan Department of Transportation, the first line was painted
in nineteen eleven on River Road in Wayne County, Michigan,
put there at the instigation of Edward inn Hines. Edward
was a major innerv and road safety spearheading the Good
Roads organization to improve public roads in Michigan in the

(06:04):
eighteen nineties. Hines also built the first stretch of concrete
road in the world in nineteen oh nine and served
on the Wayne County Board of Roads when it was
created in nineteen oh six, alongside Henry Ford himself. Hines
was said to have the original idea of pending 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 since a bedrock of

(06:27):
traffic control, took some time for it to catch on nationally.
In nineteen seventeen, in addition to doctor mcaroll, several other
people had the idea to paint lines, apparently independently of
one another, in three different states. In Michigan, Kenneth Ingles,
Sawyer's engineer, superintendent of Marquette County, painted a white center
line along a dead man's curve. In Oregon, Deputy Sheriff

(06:50):
Peter Rexford came up with the idea while 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 Moltnomah Falls in April
nineteen seventeen. It was later that fall that doctor McCarroll
was run off the road near Indio, California. Doctor mccaroll

(07:11):
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, mcaroll
painted the line herself. She instigated a letter writing campaign
that would help convince the state of California to adopt
the major Universally in November nineteen twenty four, and the
State highwa Commission painted the lines, But at the time

(07:31):
there were few, if any standards or guiding principles for markings,
and where those standards or guiding principles did exist, they
were on a local level and there was no coordination
between local agencies. In nineteen thirty, the National Conference on
Street and Highway Safety published emmanual on street traffic signs,
signals and markings. The manual recommended pavement lane markings in
a number of cases, for example on curves of less

(07:53):
than six hundred foot radius and also on hillcrests where
the view ahead as insufficient from overtaking. The passing in
safety centre 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 four inches wide and be white or yellow on
bituminous pavement and black or white on concrete. The use

(08:14):
of black lane markings became less popular during the Second
World War, when black marketings could not be seen while
driving under blackout conditions. The use of broken lines to
note places where lane changing is permitted was not defined
until a new manual was produced in nineteen forty eight.
The original purpose of the dashed lines was to save
costs by reducing the amount of paint needed to mark lanes.

(08:36):
The length of the lines and gaps was not defined,
but the manual said it should be well proportioned. The
Manualforta noted that on rural highways a commonly used standard
of fifteen foot segments with twenty five gaps was normal.
No national standard was adopted until nineteen seventy eight. Research
shows that people tend to underestimate the length of the
broken lines, with people surveyed most commonly assuming that the

(08:58):
lines are two feet long with equal gaps in between.
In fact, since nineteen seventy eight, the broken lines in
the US are standardized to be ten feet long. With
a thirty foot gap in between. Thus, every time your
car passes a new dashed line is traveled forty feet,
far further than most people assume. For years, states had

(09:20):
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 pint should be used
to divide highways. By November nineteen fifty four, forty three
years after the first central line was painted, forty seven
of the then forty eight states had decided to use
white as the dividing line, and Oregon the last state,

(09:41):
capitulated later that year. In nineteen fifty eight, the interstate
US Bureau of Public Roads adopted white lines to divide lanes,
but in nineteen seventy one the Federal Highway Administration required
now that all centre lines on two way roads be
painted yellow, while white center lines are used to demarcate
lanes of traffic going in the same direction, the now
familiar system that we use today. The history of painting

(10:05):
center line 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 Ingles Sawyer are in the Michigan Transportation Hall
of Honor, and the section of road on which doctor
McCarroll first painted her white line is now named in
her honor, the Doctor June McCarroll Memorial Freeway.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
That was the History Guy you've been listening to, and
if you want more stories of forgotten history, subscribe to
his YouTube channel, The History Guy. History deserves to be remembered.
The surprising story of lanemarkings. Here on our American Stories