A Brief History of Road Signs | Post 2 | Maine

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Across the USA

4 min readFeb 12, 2015

Unless I’ve already blinked during my first dozen clicks down Quoddy Head Rd., this is the first road sign I have encountered on this Street View cross-country trip:

Driver beware: The road will bend right and then left (or straighten out?). This sign is actually known as a Reverse Curve W1–4, falling in the W (for “warning”) series of signs under the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). Do not confuse it with W11–4:

The MUTCD website (which cites articles by and the website of Dr. H. Gene Hawkins, Jr.) confirms what we might suspect: “The evolution of these road signs provides a fascinating insight not only into the evolution of traffic control devices, but also to the pace of economic and social development in our Nation.” Their history, it seems, also represents that American tussle of local and national, state and federal, idiosyncratic and standardized.

In brief, in America, the first road signs were the product of local automobile clubs that formed in cities and regions around the country in the early 1900s. These clubs — private, and comprised of dues-paying car owners and “tourers” — designed their own signage and planted it on roads the clubs maintained and promoted. The Buffalo Automobile Club erected signposts across New York State in 1905 and the Automobile Club of California did the same on the highways near San Francisco in 1909. There was overlap and competition. Drivers might come across the signage of a dozen or so different clubs on a single popular route.

In the 1920s, good folks from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin set off in search of what today we call “best practices” and presented findings to the Mississippi Valley Association of Highway Departments. Standards emerged. By the late 1920s, the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) had produced manuals for both rural and urban signage, and in 1935 we got the first edition of the MUTCD, published by AASHO and the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. That first edition categorized signs for regulatory (e.g. stop), warning (diamond shaped like today), and guidance purposes, as well as set out rules for pavement markings (only hill crests with views of less than 500 feet required centerlines, which could be yellow, white, or black, whichever contrasted best with the road surface). By the end of the 1960s, decades of signage work by both private groups and public bodies had standardized local idiosyncrasies and culminated in Congress’s passage of the Highway Safety Act (which held back federal highway funds from states that lacked highway safety programs) and adoption of the latest MUTCD into federal law.

And so we have our yellow, Reverse Curve W1–4.

It is likely that Lubec, Maine, is as close to the Canadian border as we will get on this Great American Road Trip. So I clicked quickly through the town — already a slight detour from the southwest direction we want to head in — and checked out the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge from the parking lot of the Lubec-Campobello border post (and post office). That’s New Brunswick on the other side.

Lubec-Campobello is one of the 26 U.S.-Canada bridge or tunnel border crossings and it is open 24 hours a day. The 24-hour-a-day part came about after some controversy — on the Canadian side. It seems that soon after the bridge opened in 1962, Canadian National Revenue Minister Hugh John Flemming ordered the Canadian customs office to close from midnight to 8am (2am to 8am on the weekends). Though traffic studies had determined that border traffic during those hours was “almost non-existent”, and though the bridge remained open for medical emergencies, the Canadians of Campobello (an island) rebelled against the restrictions on their new-found instant access to mainland North America. As one Campobello resident put it: “We are still isolated from midnight to 8am and are barred from any direct contact with the rest of the world.”

And so, after residents “crashed” the border during the forbidden overnight hours, threatened to burn Flemming in effigy, and demonstrated with a cardboard “East Berlin wall”, the powers that be relented and the Lubec-Campobello opened permanently with its current 24-hour status.

Alas, one cannot make the crossing via Google Street View.