My dog needed a walk and it was getting late. The kids had gone to sleep already and the dog was curled up on one of their beds. But I knew he might not make it until morning without having to go out. The best solution to this is to take him for a late walk before I go to bed, giving him the opportunity to do his business and not have to wake us up too early in the morning.
The ground was wet from recent rains. And there weren’t many cars when we went out. But of course, one came up just as we were crossing a nearby street. I’m sure the driver had the same thought I did: no one around except one person and (just my luck, of all the places he could have been) he had to be at that same intersection just when I got there. So the driver waited at a stop sign as my dog and I crossed via the crosswalk. I waved, of course, to let him know that I appreciated him pausing for a moment.
As the car passed behind us, its headlights lit up the stop sign on our side of the street. And that got me thinking about some weighty questions. Why are stop signs in the United States in the shape of an octagon? Why are they red? And for that matter, where did the stop sign come from? What about the crosswalk that allowed me, a pedestrian, to have the right of way in front of a car that must stop and let me pass first?
I’ve been at intersections in developing countries where a sign was painted on a rock. Still other intersections seem like pure chaos because there are no signs and the individual participants in the stream of traffic seem to operate however they wish. Whether they are in motorized vehicles, riding bicycles, or leading donkeys, there is no apparent organizing principle to the flow of traffic, aside from “the person with the biggest vehicle or who honks the most goes first.” Heaven help you if you’re just walking, since pedestrians don’t have the firepower to contend with bicycles or donkeys or honking trucks.
In 1874 in New York City, a 9-year old boy named William Phelps Eno was riding in a horse-drawn cart with his mother when they encountered a traffic jam. Later, an adult Eno wrote of it: "That very first traffic jam (many years before the motor car came into use) will always remain in my memory. There were only about a dozen horses and carriages involved, and all that was needed was a little order to keep the traffic moving. Yet nobody knew exactly what to do; neither the drivers nor the police knew anything about the control of traffic."
Traffic jams were quite common in large cities even before motor cars became widespread. Police did not have many rules to enforce, so they threatened drivers with their nightsticks and tried to keep the flow of animals and vehicles moving. By the year 1900, traffic jams (and even complete stoppages) were frequent in New York City, where it could take a delivery person the better part of a day to get from one part of the city to another.
By 1900, William Phelps Eno was a Yale University graduate and businessman in New York City. That year, he wrote an essay called Reform in Our Street Traffic Urgently Needed. He made the following three suggestions:
We must have concise, simple and just rules, easily understood, obeyed and enforced under legal enactment.
These rules must be so placed and circulated that there can be no excuse for not knowing them.
The police must be empowered and ordered to enforce them, and men should be trained for that purpose.
In 1903, Eno drafted the first traffic code for the city of New York. His traffic plans later were implemented in New York, Paris, and London.
Also in 1903, the New York City Police Department asked for a plan for Columbus Circle, a large chaotic mess that produced nearly one accident per day. With Eno’s help, the traffic circle was born. It was designed so that traffic flowed in one direction only, to the right in a counterclockwise flow. Several years later, the same plan was put into place at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
In 1909, Eno wrote a book called Street Traffic Regulation, which contained an image of his traffic circle at Columbus Circle in New York. The stop sign had eight sides. And stop signs were implemented in other cities later also. But it was not until 1923 that Mississippi’s highway department came up with the red, eight-sided stop sign that we know today in North America and beyond. Mississippi’s idea was that the number of sides could indicate the severity of a hazard; railway crossing would be round and stop signs would be just below them in the hierarchy with eight sides.
From a later publication from Eno, we also learned that he invented one-way streets. “On the author's advice, One-Way Traffic was put in force in a few streets in New York in the spring of 1908; in Boston in the autumn of the same year; in Paris in 1909, where it has since been greatly extended, and in Buenos Aires in 1910. It is now used in many cities throughout the world." The Science of Highway Traffic, 1899-1920.
Today, William Phelps Eno is known as the father of traffic safety (and regulations). He’s also known for having invented the stop sign, the one-way street, the traffic circle, the pedestrian crosswalk, the taxi stand, and pedestrian safety islands. All of these may not fit on his gravestone, but they do fit on his Wikipedia page. Fans of total chaos and anarchy may spit upon his grave, but modern safety and efficiency owe a great deal to Eno’s innovations, and I’ll be thanking him the next time I walk my dog across the street. The French government granted Eno its Legion of Honour award and an honorary driver’s license (see image below), even though he never learned to drive.
A copy of Eno's honorary driver's license from France.
References:
https://interestingengineering.com/the-real-reason-behind-why-stop-signs-are-red-and-octagonal
http://mentalfloss.com/article/56877/why-do-stop-signs-have-eight-sides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Phelps_Eno
Images are public domain or credited in the text.