Why Are There Eight Sides on a Stop Sign?

It’s a question we often don’t think about, but we pass these things every day. It’s the eight-sided stop sign, the red sign with the white lettering that indicates that we need to go ahead and apply the brakes. But the stop sign hasn’t always had eight sides, nor has it always been the color red. It took many agreements and revisions to eventually make the stop sign into what we recognize today.

The stop sign wasn’t even a thought before the 1900s. Cars hadn’t begun overpopulating the streets, and people still rode horses and drove wagons. It wasn’t until 1915, when Detroit, Michigan, got the first real stop sign. It had a white background with black letters, and the thought of it was rather revolutionary. Cleveland, Ohio, even got an electric traffic signal in that year, before the use of a stop sign had even taken hold, and before it got its eight sides.

It was the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Departments who can be credited with the iconic shape of the modern stop sign. In 1923, the Association made recommendations on the shapes of a number of street signs. They came up with a simple concept. The more sides a sign had, the more it represented some greater danger.

The highest danger level sign was the circle since it had no sides. It was endorsed for use at railroad crossings. The second danger level…