Road Surface Marking - History

History

In the United States, two states claim to be the first to have developed center lines. According to the state of Michigan, painted white center lines were developed by Edward N. Hines, the chairman of the Wayne County, Michigan, Board of Roads in 1911. The first highway centerline was painted along M-15 (later a section of US Highway 41 or M-28) in 1917, by Kenneth Ingalls Sawyer, a claim supported by the Federal Highway Administration. According to the state of California, Dr. June McCarroll was the first to develop center lines, in 1917. In 2002, a portion of Interstate 10 was designated and signed as "The Doctor June McCarroll Memorial Freeway" in her honor.

White center lines were used in the United States until the 1971 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which mandated yellow as the standard color of center lines nationwide (after several decades of debate on the issue and some states already offering the double and single solid yellow center line). The changeover to the 1971 MUTCD standards took place between 1971 and 1975 with most done by the end of 1973, so for two years drivers still had to use the old and new. Yellow was adopted because it was already the standard color of warning signs, and because it was easy to teach drivers to associate yellow lines with dividing opposing traffic and white lines with dividing traffic in the same direction. In turn, this simple mnemonic device greatly reduced head-on collisions and improved road traffic safety.

The major downside to the MUTCD white-yellow system is that yellow has slightly less contrast than white, especially at night, so for maximum contrast, bright yellow—and highly toxic—lead chromate was used to paint yellow lines through the end of the twentieth century. As a result, U.S. transportation workers must take special precautions when disturbing or removing yellow lane markings.

In England, the idea of painting a centre white line was first experimented with in 1921 in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham. Following complaints by residents over reckless driving and several collisions, the Sutton Coldfield Corporation decided to paint the line on Maney Corner in the area of Maney.

In 1971, a correspondent for the Sutton Coldfield News wrote an article in the newspaper recalling the event.

The line was put down as an experiment as there were a lot of accidents there, even in the early days of the motor car. The experiment proved to be so successful that the whole country adopted it as a standard road safety device, and later foreign countries put white line on their roads, too.