Lane
In road transport, a lane is part of a roadway that is designated to be used by a single line of vehicles to control and guide drivers and reduce traffic conflicts.
For much of human history, roads did not need lane markings because most people walked or rode horses at relatively slow speeds.
However, when automobiles, trucks, and buses came into widespread use during the first two decades of the 20th century, head-on collisions became more common.
)[2] In 1909, the commission ordered the construction of the first concrete road (Woodard Avenue in Detroit), and conceived the centerline for highways in 1911.
Hence, then chairman of the Road Commission, Edward N. Hines, is widely credited as the inventor of lane markings.
[3] The introduction of lane markings as a common standard is connected to June McCarroll, a physician in Indio, California.
She began experimenting with painting lines on roads in 1917 after being run off a highway by a truck driver.
After years of lobbying by McCarroll and her allies, the state of California officially adopted a policy of painting lines on its highways in November 1924.
The first lane markings in Europe were painted at an accident hotspot in the small town of Sutton Coldfield near Birmingham, England, in 1921.
The success of this experiment made its way to other hotspots and led to standardization of white paint lane markings throughout Great Britain.
When the standard for the new autobahn network was conceived in the 1930s, it mandated the usage of black paint for the center line for each carriageway.
A small number of jurisdictions have truck-only lanes, intended to increase reliability of freight deliveries.
This means that the rearmost axle of the trailer does not follow the lateral path of the truck tractor unit, but may travel significantly—up to 1–3 meters (3–10 ft)—away from the curve center.
Hence, narrow lanes on sharp curves have to be designed slightly wider than on straight roads.
This effect is much greater on slippery snow-covered roads than on bare asphalt or cement concrete, calling for even larger lane widening.
In the United States, Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands and Norway, yellow lines separate traffic going in opposite directions and white separates lanes of traffic traveling in the same direction; but that is not the case in many European countries.
Lane capacity varies widely due to conditions such as neighboring lanes, lane width, elements next to the road, number of driveways, presence of parking, speed limits, number of heavy vehicles and so on – the range can be as low as 1000 passenger cars / hour to as high as 4800 passenger cars / hour but mostly falls between 1500 and 2400 passenger cars / hour.
