Michigan highway pioneer honored for 1911 invention of center line

[Brandon]

From the Detroit Free Press,

An international design group has honored Michigan roads pioneer Edward Hines -- for whom the Wayne County park with a scenic 20-mile roadway is named -- for his invention a century ago that made driving safer around the world.

He conceived the world's first highway center line.

[US71]

From the Detroit Free Press,

An international design group has honored Michigan roads pioneer Edward Hines -- for whom the Wayne County park with a scenic 20-mile roadway is named -- for his invention a century ago that made driving safer around the world.

He conceived the world's first highway center line.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Hines

[bulldog1979]

and Kenneth Ingalls Sawyer was the first to paint a center line on a rural state highway (then M-15, now County Road 492). Mr. Sawyer was the superintendent of the Marquette County Road Commission who had the line painted along Dead Man's Curve in 1917. The county later named the first county airport for him, and the name was used when the US Air Force converted it to KI Sawyer AFB in the 1950s. (In a twist, the county moved the airport back there in the 1990s and rechristened it Sawyer International Airport.)