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[00:00:22] This is Garlic and Pearls with me Muriel Zagha and my friend Suzanne Raine. I'm French, Suzanne is British and on this podcast we talk about all the things that make the British so British and the French so French. Suzanne, today it's your turn to tell me about something, bracing myself slightly because I know what it is, but I can't quite comprehend how very, very British it's going to be. So what is it?
[00:00:52] It's so British. Sometimes I bring you a present. Today I've not brought you a present, but you can find this present all over the streets of London and indeed the streets of Britain and indeed the streets of the world. That's very exciting.
[00:01:10] Because this is something which is very British, which we have given to the entire world, which almost everybody will have used without even thinking probably. And that is Muriel, the Zebra Crossing. Oh! I've never thought about it much, no. Well… Did you invent it really truly? Obviously, we're going to have the story of it.
[00:01:40] Okay. But I thought I'd start by, I was recently at a conference run by a business school and an eminent economist, he was talking about the American Road Network, which came out of the British Road Network, because I know you hate to think about this, but we did kind of pioneer quite a lot of this stuff. We invented tarmac, for example, about which probably more… Another time, yes. Another time, yes.
[00:02:04] And he was talking about how the road networks developed through a mix of individual entrepreneurialism and then at a certain point, governmental intervention and regulation, which… Without which it would have been chaotic.
[00:02:24] And one of the people in the audience who is a business person said, so there's a parallel thing today with artificial intelligence and when is the point where the entrepreneurialism is met with the regulations so that it doesn't all stay chaotic forever?
[00:02:41] And the economist, who's very eminent, gave a very eminent answer and I thought, I knew the actual answer because I'd been researching for this episode of Garlic and Pearls. This is great. The actual answer is mass death. Oh, gosh.
[00:03:02] It was huge amounts of fatalities that led to government intervention and the invention eventually of the zebra crossing. And I'm going to take you on that journey. This is so exciting. To get that. Yeah. So that's where we are.
[00:03:22] I should also say that I often feel, I feel really proud of every time I cross the road in Britain, that we've organised it so that pedestrians can walk pretty freely and pretty much where they are without censure. And in most instances, there is a crossing in the right place so that you can walk across it and don't get run over and actually don't have stress.
[00:03:52] That's true. And I don't think it's like that in France or certainly isn't like that for me in France. In France, you take your life in your hands because, I mean, we'll get on to this, but essentially the rules in terms of the law are not dissimilar.
[00:04:09] It's just that the behaviour is different in that there's a joke, you know, that zebra crossings in France are there to indicate the place where it's OK to put your foot on the accelerator and mow pedestrians down. And of course, that's not really what they're for. But in practice, that's often how it feels, although some drivers are very courteous and do the right thing. Crossing the road is possible in France.
[00:04:35] You can do it, but you just have to look both ways, be super careful, really gauge the distance of approaching cars, their velocity. Can you make it? You can't rely on them to stop for you. So that is an important difference in terms of what we now call lived experience, which we used to call experience. But I don't think the French feel fearful. They just get on with it because that's how it is. If you're a visitor, it's shocking, isn't it?
[00:05:05] Well, it's discourteous, I think, possibly. But I think, though, I don't want to give any impression that it's the French, it's your fault as such. Thank you. Because I think that there is ambiguity everywhere. Everywhere in the world, there are zebra crossings now. And in many places, the rules are slightly less clear because you have zebra crossings in different circumstances.
[00:05:31] And different rules apply if it's at a traffic light or it isn't, if it's on this kind of a road or that. And the question of who has priority is vaguer or open to interpretation. And as soon as you let that happen, it's a free-for-all. And I think that's in my head, that's how it is when I go to France. I actually don't know whether it's my right to cross the road or not, whether I have a right not to be run over or not.
[00:06:01] And indeed, I was in Casablanca earlier this week. And it was extraordinary because there are zebra crossings everywhere. And it does seem that the pedestrian has, exactly as you're saying, the pedestrian has the right to walk. But absolutely no understanding that the car will stop. I mean, you're just walking, they're just ploughing towards you. Okay, I'll just hold my ground to see what happens. So I think that's part of the thing.
[00:06:30] I mean, obviously in America, it's illegal to walk in the road, which I cannot get my head back. That's jaywalking. That's what jaywalking is. Yes, I just... And you get told off. I mean, even if you're not arrested, you get told off by Americans. If you're a tourist, I mean, French people are famous for it because of our difficult conditions at home. We tend to go freelance. Yes. And so we cross the road anyhow in America. And people will say, don't do that. It's dangerous, you know, and that they have a point.
[00:07:00] Well, they do. But in, I would like, okay, so here's my story that I'll put to you. Okay. Shall we start by really defining what a zebra crossing is? Right. So that everybody knows. Okay. Why don't you define it and then I can give you some measurements. Is it... Right. So a zebra crossing is not attached to traffic lights necessarily.
[00:07:24] It's the white stripes on the road that define the zone that is for crossing the road. That's what it is. But sometimes there's a traffic light and sometimes there isn't. Is that right? In Britain, there isn't. It's very distinct. Right. And I'm going to... We're going to do the whole story. It's very exciting.
[00:07:48] But it is just the essence of zebra crossing is longitudinal stripes on the road parallel to the flow of traffic. And they're alternatively a light color and a dark one. So white and the color of the tarmac, which was also invented here. Yeah. And obviously, it looks a bit like a zebra.
[00:08:14] And this was apparently coined by Jim Callaghan, who became much later in his career prime minister, but at the time was not prime minister. But he saw it and said, oh, it looks quite a little bit like a zebra. And he never admitted that it was him. So it might not have been. But anyway, that's obvious why it's called a zebra. And they are typically, the stripes, between one and a half and two feet wide. So that's between 40 and 60 centimeters.
[00:08:44] Okay. And that is universal and not arbitrary, the width. It's a result of science, British science. Love it. Absolutely love it. It's the result of a study of the human eye's ability to register contrast on wet asphalt at low light through a moving car's windscreen. Oh, yes. That's very good. Painting you there. And then we're going to zoom off and come back to the story of how.
[00:09:14] So we all have them. But I think we, we're the pure, the sort of unadulterated, this is what they are. I'm going to start with the highway code. Oh, brilliant. Do you have a highway code in France? Because you're the sort of people who codify everything. I like that question. Do we have a highway code? Of course. It's called le code de la route. We have a code de la route, Suzanne.
[00:09:38] It was completely formalized as a complete system in 1921. There were embryonic stages before that, you know, under Napoleon, who, you know, Napoleon loved legislation. And he introduced various rules already in terms of usage of roads. Then there were, there was a set of about 10 rules introduced in 1904, but it wasn't the full cream, you know, version of it. So that's, that's 1921.
[00:10:07] What about Britain? Well, you obviously beat us and I don't want to say we would have copied you, but it is, it is quite a sort of French thing to have done to have a highway code. Well, it's rules, isn't it? We love rules. And then breaking them, of course, as well, paradoxically. Yes. And so obviously something quite weird is that we adopted the highway code. We introduced the highway code in 1931. So a decade after you. Ten whole years, listeners. Just saying.
[00:10:38] A bit decimal sounding that, isn't it? Ten. How annoying. We introduced it and we still very much use it. And it's a way of teaching young people about the road, which I'm sure you'll recall. I've been reading it because there are a large number of rules in the highway code that concern crossing the road and crossings. So rules seven to 17 concern crossing the road.
[00:11:06] So how to avoid crossing by parked cars and things. And then rules 18 to 30 concern the crossings themselves. I've got some pictures here, which I'm going to show you. So that's rule 19, which is what can you see? So I can see a zebra crossing, excitingly. And on each side of the road, there's one of those flashing yellow lights that tell you it's safe to cross. And I suppose, well, they tell you, they tell the cars to stop, don't they?
[00:11:35] Really, that's what they're for. In the middle of the zebra crossing, there are two figures. So they're in the process of crossing the road. And on either side of the zebra crossing in the road, there is a car on each side, which is stationary. So everything is happening as it should. Everything's happening as it should. So rule 19 is zebra crossings. Give traffic plenty of time to see you and stop, obviously. Vehicles will need more time when the road is slippery.
[00:12:04] Wait until traffic has stopped before you cross. Remember that it doesn't have to stop until someone has moved onto the crossing. That's it. You have to put your foot on the crossing. You have to show your intent in order to get the priority. And then I've highlighted this bit. Drivers and riders should give way to pedestrians waiting to cross and must give way to pedestrians on a zebra crossing. So that's the thing.
[00:12:34] And then it says, see rule H2. So rule H2, you have to cross-reference it. Yeah. Is about hierarchy. So the hierarchy of road users is this concept which puts road users most at risk in the event of a collision at the top of the hierarchy. Okay.
[00:12:58] So it's very clear in the Highway Code, it does not remove the need for everyone to behave responsibly. No. So you can't say just because I'm most at risk. I can just cross the road anyhow. Absolutely. You still, but the road users, this is from the Highway Code, the road users most likely to be injured in the event of a collision are pedestrians, cyclists, horse riders and motorcyclists with children, older adults and disabled people being more at risk.
[00:13:26] And then you've got the following H rules that clarify the whole thing. And I'm going to read it all out because it's there on the internet for everybody to see. But rule H2, which we've cross-referenced from, says, you must give way to pedestrians on a zebra crossing and to pedestrians and cyclists on a parallel crossing. And then further down, because it's the hierarchy of risk, horse riders should also give way to
[00:13:55] pedestrians on a zebra crossing and to pedestrians and cyclists on a parallel crossing. Sorry, sorry to interrupt. So everybody has their place. Yeah. Right. All a hierarchy. And then rule 20. And I'm just going to show you a more complex diagram. Yes. It's rule 20. I see again a zebra crossing with the flashing yellow streetlights. And this time there's a traffic island in the middle. Yeah.
[00:14:23] And then, and also vehicles on, you know, at this side of a sea and people in the process of crossing. So what, okay, the traffic island. So there is one just outside my flat, actually, because I live on quite a busy road. And there's a zebra crossing. I know I've just, I really just really thought about it. But there's a zebra crossing outside where I live and a traffic island in the middle. See, there's always one where you need one. Presumably because there's a lot of traffic on this road.
[00:14:51] We can't be certain to be able to cross the entire road in one go. That's what it is for, isn't it? It's for a graceful pause in the middle. So you don't get moaned down. Well, in theory, though, of course, as soon as you stepped onto it, because of the hierarchy of risk, you have priority and they should all stop. I think the thing that it's telling us, and I don't quite know why there are islands in some places and not others. That's the separate question.
[00:15:20] Is if you start on the zebra crossing and there's an island in the middle, you have to concede that you can't get all the way across in one go. So if you're walking in the first half, the cars that are going to drive across the second half are not obliged to stop until you've stepped off the island in the middle on the second half. Right. You're crossing in two separate episodes.
[00:15:48] So it says the rule is where there is an island in the middle of a zebra crossing, wait on the island and follow rule 19 before you cross the second half of the road. And rule 19 is a zebra crossing with central island is two separate crossings. It's two separate crossings. I was going to say, yeah. It's two separate crossings. So I think we've covered the rules, which is important to baseline our discussion. Sure. Yes. I feel grounded.
[00:16:17] Because, you know, you're the rule people. And this is the weirdness is that we've invented this rule in order to allow ourselves total freedom in a way. So in the UK, because this is the highway code, but it's also law, you have punishment if you don't comply. And this is where somehow it's different because we do stop at zebra crossings if you're driving a car. You don't. So why do we do this?
[00:16:46] It's because I think we love the idea of standing in the middle of the road and stopping all the traffic. You get a fine of £100 and three license penalty points if you fail to give way at the crossings. People have said that's not very much money to have to pay, actually. Is it enough to be deterrent? But if you are not stopping at a zebra crossing by a school with a lollipop lady, then it stacks
[00:17:13] up and you then get penalty of £1,000 and even the possibility of disqualification. So it can get worse. So shall we now, Muriel, because you've borne with me while I've explained to you what a zebra crossing is, which you know, although I don't think you know everything. I don't. I think the island thing was new to you. It was. I'd never thought about it. Shall we go back to the mass death element? Yes, yes, yes.
[00:17:43] I'd like to, well, I don't like to hear about mass death, but I'm just interested in finding out the, you know, the cause and effect. Yeah. And the birth of what I like to call the big Z. I should be calling it the big Z, but we've all started saying Z now for reasons that are hideous. And how did it come about that we gave it to the whole world? And is this going to be the same thing that happens with art? Are we going to end up with zebra crossings for artificial intelligence? That's what I put to you.
[00:18:13] And driverless cars and all of that. So one of the natural consequences, obviously, of the introduction of motor vehicles and the introduction of tarmac, which happened in the early 20th century, I'm not going to tell you any more because that's a separate conversation, was a significant increase in death on the roads.
[00:18:40] Because in 1903, there was a piece of major legislation called the Motor Car Act. And it was born out of, as you can imagine, we often have bitter parliamentary debates. Because it was the time when everything was, you know, Wild West, cars everywhere, death on the roads. We introduced motor vehicle registration, driver licensing.
[00:19:10] And do you remember when we talked about A roads and the speed limits was four miles an hour in rural areas and two miles an hour in towns? And that was then raised in the Locomotives on Highways Act of 1896 to 14 miles an hour. So pretty speedy. Yeah. Woo. And there was some who said, can we just get rid of the speed limit? We don't need a speed limit.
[00:19:38] And there was a big row within the, what was then the Automobile Club, which was to become the Royal Automobile Club, the RAC. There was a schism between a man called John Douglas Scott Montague, who chaired the working group on the bill that was to become the Motor Car Act. And he had kind of sort of, you know, slightly okay, maybe speed limits might be a good thing approach.
[00:20:06] But then the chair of the organization was a man called Roger Wallace. And he was strongly against a speed limit. And he called Douglas Scott Montague a traitor. So they proposed this sort of compromise to say, well, let's have a speed limit of 25 miles an hour. And they had then bitter parliamentary debates.
[00:20:32] And in the end, this Act of 1903, they raised the speed limit on the public highway from 14 miles an hour to 20 miles an hour. So that's just important background. Can I just ask, the Wallace, was it, who was entirely against? Yes. Is this because, A, he loved automobiles and he just wanted them to keep going and not need to slow down, need for speed.
[00:20:58] But also maybe because he believed in self-regulation and people being civilized and naturally knowing how fast to go. Did he have faith in that, do you think? Yeah. And I think he probably couldn't imagine cars that went at 150 miles an hour. Well, of course, of course, of course. We're talking about raising it from 14 miles an hour to 20 miles an hour. You know. It's very charming. It's very charming. I think they just thought, well, this is slightly faster than a horse now, but not a lot.
[00:21:28] Brilliant. Anyway, so they raised the speed limit. They raised it to 20 miles an hour. In 1926, there were on the roads 4,886 fatalities, so just shy of 5,000, in 124,000 crashes. Wow. And so that's quite a lot of deaths. It is a lot of deaths.
[00:21:53] And we know this because that was the year that we started counting fatalities on the road as a result of cars. Because it's a new kind of death. Exactly. Right. It's a new kind of mass death. And so we set up something that we still have called the Road Casualties of Great Britain, which is produced annually, like the Guinness Book of Records, but it's about how many people die on our roads. And it is still being produced.
[00:22:22] So I've got figures. I had a look at 2024s, which is the most recent one you can get online. And the good news is that since 1979, there has been a downward, this is in brackets, there's been a downward trend in the number of people killed on roads, and then a flatter trend in the decades since 2010. So it went down a lot in the 1970s, 80s, in the 80s and 90s, and then it's flattened a bit.
[00:22:48] And in 2024, we had slightly fewer deaths and casualties than 2023. So, for example, final estimates, this is just to contextualize everything. Final estimates for 2024 are 1,602 fatalities, just under 30,000 killed or seriously injured casualties, which is lower,
[00:23:16] and 128,000 casualties of all severities, which has also gone down. Then there's a whole load of other ways of presenting these statistics. So 4.7 road fatalities per billion vehicle miles traveled in 2024, which is down. And then they also look at who dies. Right.
[00:23:41] So of the four major road user types, the group with the most fatalities was car occupants. So that's where you're most likely to die in a road accident. So not pedestrians, for example. Not pedestrians, interesting. Or cyclists. No. And in 2024, 76% of fatalities and 61% of casualties of all severities were men.
[00:24:11] So much more likely to be killed or injured in an RTA if you're a man. And this is all a digression. I'm coming back and I realize I'm using up my time quite profligately. In international comparisons, for example, from 2024, Great Britain was fourth out of 36 countries with available data for the lowest number of road fatalities. That's really good. So who's first?
[00:24:40] Well, the Scandinavians, actually. Of course. So I'm afraid to say not you. Not the French. So I should say as well that car occupants, 692. 1922, pedestrians, 409. So there was the second largest group. It's pedestrians, of course. And then motorcyclists and then pedal cyclists. Right. That's all a digression. But just to tell you that you can learn all of this stuff. It's available. We count it all the time and we put it on the internet.
[00:25:10] So clearly by 1926, everyone could see that 20 miles an hour was far too fast. Fatalities were out of control. Yeah. So they produced in 1929 a new road traffic bill. Okay. Basically would say, how can we control traffic on the roads? And the answer was the Road Traffic Act of 1930, introduced by the Minister of Transport, Herbert Morrison.
[00:25:39] This was the second Labour government of Ramsey MacDonald. It was a Labour government. And it revolutionised road safety. But, and this is the thing that's so British. It introduced a whole set of driving offences for dangerous, reckless, careless driving. You couldn't drive if you were unfit or if you were drunk or if you were on drugs. That's great. Here's the really British thing.
[00:26:07] What do you think it did to speed limits? Did it raise them? No, it abolished them. It abolished them. Even better. Why would we want speed limits? Right. Because they were not needed. No. Why not? Because they were not needed. Because there was bloodbath on the roads. Right.
[00:26:30] Because the 20 mile an hour limit was universally flouted and therefore deemed to be unenforceable. The cause, actually. So, well, not the cause, but not the cause of the accidents. But the debate in Parliament said, because this law is unenforceable, it brings the idea of law into disrepute. That's amazing.
[00:26:56] You know, it reminds me of, we did an episode about roundabouts, about French roundabouts. And I think there was something a little bit like that in that episode, but it was more to do with the idea that the French were too bullshy and too sort of Mediterranean in their temperament to give way. That they simply would not accept it because it was meant to be more of a sort of match of face-off on the road.
[00:27:24] Whereas the British understood that it was important to give way. I know. Yeah. So, anyway, so we'd have this speed limit. There was then a huge backlog of cases in court because if you're going to have a law, you then have to prosecute people for flagrantly disobeying the law. So, then the AA and the RAC, obviously on the side of the motorist.
[00:27:48] So, they defended their motorist who was being prosecuted for overspeeding. And that then became a problem in itself because you had this tension between the automobile associations who were against the speed limit and the court who was trying to prosecute them. And everyone said, if this is so universally disobeyed that its maintenance brings the law into contempt, let's just not have a speed limit. So, we got rid of the speed limit.
[00:28:18] That sounds mad. That sounds completely mad, not having a speed limit. I can't imagine how they thought people were going to regulate themselves. So, what do you think the consequences were of the abolition of the speed limit in 1930? Major fatalities. Yes. Major fatalities. Just explosive. Yeah, and of course. So, in 1934… Who could have foreseen it? Nobody. What a surprise, honestly. I know.
[00:28:47] It was so British though. It's so British. It's like, let's just not have this law because it's too annoying. Interesting. So, in 1934, there was a record number of road casualties in the UK. So, 7,343 deaths. That's enormous. And 231,603 injuries on the road. And half of those casualties were pedestrians and three quarters were in towns. So, it's people trying… It's you coming out of your house.
[00:29:17] It's me trying to cross the road. Yes. And there's an HGV full of aggregates coming down. Well, no, it wouldn't have been in 1934. But what's it, you know, a small HGV. A small van full of Hovis bread or something. Like in that ad. But lethal. Totally lethal. And actually, as well, because the other thing was brakes weren't very good in those days, of course. That's just awful. What an awful reality. So, do you remember when we were in my Morris Minor?
[00:29:46] And that's much more modern a car. And that had no brakes at all. It was like driving on a roller skate. That was exciting. We told that story. I think we did. It was the time where Suzanne almost killed me on the motorway. And then we survived. So, it's all okay. But that was, to be fair to it, that was because the brakes had failed. Not just because they were not operating at their normal level of badness. No, they had completely failed. We had no brakes at all. No. But generally, even when it was working, there was a long... The point is, the point is mass death.
[00:30:16] Now, I'm going to introduce a man who I think we might call one of the genuinely transformational figures in the global use of roads. Wow. And he is called Isaac Leslie Hoare Belisha, First Baron Hoare Belisha. And that's Hoare, spelled H-O-R-E. And Belisha. You may know... Does that ring any bells with you? It does, but I can't place him. Yeah, I see. So... How do I know the name? Because... Does he have a statue in Bollerman Square?
[00:30:46] So, if you were British, which you're not, you would know because you'd say, oh, he's the man who invented the Belisha beacon. What's the Belisha beacon? Yeah. So, when you were describing... This is fascinating. Yeah. When you were describing those pictures from the Highway Code of the zebra crossing with the two lamps with the flashing orange... Is that what it is? The Belisha beacon. He invented those. What a hero. Well, he had them be invented. Yes.
[00:31:13] So, he's a real hero and a complex character about whom I can... I mean, there's a whole story there that I can't tell because I haven't even got to the zebra crossing invention yet. But his dates are 1893 to 1957. And he was Minister of Transport for the critical years, 1934 to 1937.
[00:31:36] I'm going to just give you a very brief element of his backstory because he was a very different figure from most people who at that time were establishment figures. He was born in a Jewish family in Hampstead in 1893. He was an only child and his dad was Jacob and his mum was Elizabeth.
[00:32:00] And his grandfather, Isaac Belisha, had been president of the Manchester Sephardi community. Ah. Because the Belisha family originally comes from Morocco. And his father died when he was one. And his widowed mother married a man called Adair Hoare, who was at that time permanent secretary of the Ministry of Pension. So, she sort of married into British civil service bureaucracy. The political, yes, bureaucracy.
[00:32:29] And he, Belisha, adopted his stepfather's name Hoare. So, he became Hoare Belisha. He studied in Heidelberg and Oxford. He fought in the British Army in the First World War, served in France and Flanders and Salonica. And he ended with the rank of major. And then he returned to Oxford and qualified as a barrister. So, you know, super high achiever.
[00:32:52] And he was, by all accounts, flamboyant, brilliant, quick-witted, quite showy-offy. He went into politics straight away after the war. He didn't win the first time he tried, but then he got a seat in 1923 for the Liberals. There was lots of political shenanigans all the way through the 20s, strikes, marches. 1931, general election. He was appointed as a junior minister.
[00:33:21] Schisms in the Liberal Party. He ended up, as I said, Minister of Transport in 1934. I'm going to tell you the rest of his story really in two sentences now, and then we can come back to the Belisha Beacons. But he, because he was Jewish and because he was quite flamboyant and brilliant, and because this was then the 1930s, it all got very tense and stressful. And he ended up with Chamberlain trying to avoid war.
[00:33:50] Then he changed his position on that. He fell out quite considerably with a number of leaders of the British Armed Forces. By the end of the 30s, he was arguing very strongly that we should be rearmoring and preparing for war, which hadn't been his earlier position, but he'd undermined his own position with them by then. And so he ended up in quite an antagonistic situation. And a lot of people said that one of the reasons for that was anti-Semitism.
[00:34:20] I'm not going to debate all of that now because I can't, because this is a thing about zebra crossings. But he's a very interesting political figure in his own right. Anyway, shortly before being appointed Minister of Transport, he was crossing Camden High Street when a sports car, let's imagine, shot across the street without stopping and nearly caused him serious injury. Terrible behaviour. Terrible behaviour.
[00:34:49] And so he immediately said, because he was an active person, he was a doer, he said, we're just going to stop this if it's out of hand. So he introduced the Road Traffic Act of 1934, which had a speed limit of 30 miles an hour for motor cars in built-up areas. It was vigorously opposed because it was a removal of an Englishman's freedom of the highway, was what they called it. Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:18] He rewrote the highway code and he introduced the driving test and the Belisha Beacon, which was named after him by the general public. And on his retirement, much, much later, he got made vice president of the Pedestrians Association. So that's really nice. That's really nice. So the Belisha Beacon is, it's a pole which is black and white stripes,
[00:35:46] and then it has a yellow coloured globe on top, which is flashing usually. At that point, we had the beacons, but not the zebra. Oh, I see. Okay. So the Ministry of Transport erected them at the curbs, and they rolled it out nationally in 1935. So it was halfway there, really. Not perfect, but okay. This is the place where you can cross.
[00:36:13] They nearly all ended during the war, because in December 1941, they made a study of the cost and the effectiveness of melting down the, at that time, so this is only less than a decade later, 64,000 Belisha Beacons that we'd put all over the country. They were going to melt them all down to make armaments. Of course, yeah.
[00:36:38] And as was noted, a plan which threatened to deprive the right honourable member for Devonport of his last hope of immortality. So, you know, people were really snarky about him, actually. So then we're building to the denouement here, which is the introduction, the invention of the zebra. So after the war, and it's been a bit chaotic during the war because of all the blackouts. So Belisha Beacons couldn't be flashing,
[00:37:08] which is obviously why they thought they might as well melt them all down. After the war, pedestrian deaths started to stack up again. And in 1948, the Central Office of Information made this short film which said, this is the correct way to use a pedestrian crossing. Okay. But it didn't have the stripes. And then we still had this problem with increasing car traffic, increasing car speed capability. Both pedestrians and the drivers
[00:37:38] were ignoring the crossing. That's terrible. So how to make it better? Let's invent. What's that problem? It was designed at something called the Road Research Laboratory. Wonderful. It's so, I know. It's exactly what you need to have in the late 1940s, isn't it? The Road Research Laboratory, which had been established in 1933 by the UK government. And it became the Transport and Road Research Laboratory
[00:38:07] in 1972. And it's now rather disappointingly TRL Limited, trading as TRL because it was privatized in 1996, sort of legacy of Thatcher. Okay. And it's now an independent private company and transport consultancy. Okay. Not the same thing at all. Not the same thing at all. So during the Second World War, the Road Research Laboratory contributed to the war effort big time. And in particular,
[00:38:36] and this is quite extraordinary really, they did this big thing researching pressures and damages cause by explosions in the air and underwater. And there was a man called Barnes Wallace who you probably haven't heard of, but did you ever hear of him? No, but I love the name. Who was he? He was the man who led the development of the bouncing bomb, which in May 1943 was used to attack the Mona, the Eder and the Sorp dams in the Ruhr Valley.
[00:39:06] So the sort of dam busters thing. That was that. And that all came out of this research, which came out of the Road Research Laboratory. I mean, I'm sure there were other bits of laboratories as well, but it was critical. The zebra markings accredited to a physicist and traffic engineer called George Charlesworth, who was the first head of the traffic section at the Road Research Laboratory.
[00:39:34] So I've been reading his obituary in the Times. And I think we should now devote a little portion of what remains to George Charlesworth, inventor of the zebra crossing. He was born in 1917 near Skipton in Yorkshire in a place called Elslac. And he was the only child of a headmaster and his wife. His mother died when he was 12. He was an exceptional scholar, excelling in mathematics, physics and chemistry,
[00:40:04] and awarded a county major scholarship and a state scholarship for a place at university. He gained a BSc with first class honours in physics with electrical engineering and a PhD at the University of Leeds and was subsequently awarded a DSC. So great Yorkshire physicist and engineer. That's what we're looking at here as usual. He joined the Road Research Laboratory shortly before the war and he worked very much as part of the team that developed
[00:40:34] the bouncing bomb. But his main career was traffic engineer. And at the end of the war, he became head of the traffic section and he turned his expertise to ways of reducing traffic accidents and making roads safer. His main focus of research was intersection design. Okay. So important. It's like signage design. It's so important. I know the whole thing because you remember when we were doing A-Rose and we talked about those people
[00:41:03] and they did amazing research they did on sort of, you know... How much you can take in of a sign when you're driving past it. Well, he did the same thing. Yeah, exactly. So from 1948-49, he started to run experiments on what is the best way to produce something people can see and people can see if they're in a car in difficult driving conditions or in the dark and it's raining and, you know, your windscreen wipers don't really work properly, which they didn't
[00:41:33] in those days. How can we make people see this and pay attention? So he ran a contrast perception study looking at how human eyes perceive contrast and this is where it's all getting a little bit scientific. Okay. But they tried, for example, solid white rectangles. So they said, let's just have one big white rectangle. Oh yeah, yes. And that didn't work at all because people, when they were driving towards them, it just, you know, like a mirage in the desert. It looked like
[00:42:02] a sort of patch of road surfacing. Yes. So they couldn't really tell from a distance traveling towards it at speed, especially if it was raining. They couldn't make out that it was different. So they just ignored them. And then they tried two solid lines but people couldn't really see those from far away either. So they, and they tried dashes and people couldn't really see those. And none of those ideas appeared to significantly enhance the visibility such as that it'd be worth the price
[00:42:32] of the paint and all the effort of painting. So he wired up a test track in Slough or just outside Slough actually. And he had eight different patterns that he painted onto the roads, kind of zigzags and stripes and various things. And then he drove test cars over them in every different imaginable condition. And the driver, he didn't do all the driving, he got drivers. And drivers wore eye tracking equipment. And they can measure how long it took.
[00:43:02] I don't know how, but this is great science. It's great science to see how long it took them to register the, so how many seconds they saw it to registering it in some way. And the results were completely emphatic. So the black and white zebra took less than one second from a moving car in every condition. So you see it and you register it somehow. Wow. And I don't know, don't ask me, that's the level of my knowledge. Solid lines
[00:43:32] to see those took between two and three seconds and dashed lines took four. People just didn't see them in time. And that's because the eye doesn't register patterns by colour or shape, but it registers edges. So the zebra has dozens of edges where one thing changes to another. Okay. Whereas a rectangle only has two edges, so it's just all one. And I think
[00:44:01] the shape of the pattern is the message. That was the thing he realised. That is fascinating. It even works when half of the stripes are obscured in mud or snow or something. He found that the alternating black and white pattern is the most visible piece of paint a wet eye can register from the windscreen of a moving car at night. And it beat hands down solid lines, dashed lines, zigzag lines. They tried with blue and yellow. It wasn't nearly as good as black and white.
[00:44:31] And so the first installation was at a single crossroads in Slough and pedestrian deaths at that one crossing they'd had four the year before. But in the six months after introducing the zebra crossing, zero. Wasn't it also in Slough that the wheelie bin was... Yeah. Yeah. Was invented. What's an amazing powerhouse it turns out to be. I think there's a lot of things and also there's a lot of data centres now in Slough. Right. So this is where
[00:45:01] stuff is going to happen next. Anyway, so it was so emphatically successful that over the next few years, 1951 onwards, the British government rolled the design out across the country and here's the thing. In 1953, the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, can you imagine, adopted it as the European standard. So this is a rare example
[00:45:30] of Britain inventing a standard that Europe adopts rather than France inventing a standard that it tries to impose on Britain. You see, every now and again, something brilliant. And then, amazingly, the United Nations codified it as a global recommended pattern in the Vienna Convention in 1968. And it is now painted on tarmac
[00:45:59] and any other kind of road surface on every continent in the globe. That's extraordinary. It's adopted throughout the whole place and Mr. Charlesworth became known as Dr. Zebra. Dr. Zebra, that's wonderful. Absolutely brilliant. So he's Dr. Zebra. Even autonomous vehicle settings are now configured to recognise the standard edition Zebra Crossing. Really? So that
[00:46:28] will work then when we all have driverless cars? To be legally compliant in the UK, every Zebra crossing must be equipped with two Belisha beacons. Yes, that makes sense. And if you have, remember we went back to the traffic island, if you have a traffic island, the traffic authority can opt to place more beacons in the island. Yes, as the image you showed me had more beacons in the island,
[00:46:58] I noticed that. Yeah. So, very quickly now, we're ending, but I just thought we'd just nod to two famous zebra crossings. Are they your favourites? No, they're not my favourites. Neither of these is my favourite zebra crossing. Oh, I haven't got a favourite. Have you got a favourite zebra crossing? No, but I'm going to try and think of one for next time. Maybe the one outside your door is your favourite zebra crossing. Well, I mean, it's the one, yes, I mean, it takes me home, it takes me to where I want
[00:47:27] to go, it's wonderful. So, the two famous ones, there's one famous one in Britain and then there's a very famous one in Japan. And I'm wondering if you've been to the famous one in Japan. I think I have, but of course I can't remember the name of the crossings. Is this the extremely famous and busy crossing in Tokyo where I don't know how many hundreds of people could cross it all at once? It's called The Shibuya Crossing. The Shibuya Crossing and it's in Lost in Translation, you know, that film with
[00:47:58] Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, there's a scene where, well, there's a couple of scenes actually where you see it and then I did actually cross it myself and it is dizzying. But what struck me there and there we get into, you know, different nations, the Japanese, what they're like, people don't bump into each other, people are not looking at their phones, they know where they're going and they manage somehow to cross each other on this quite complex crossing without any collisions. That's Japan. And apparently approximately
[00:48:27] two and a half thousand people cross the Shibuya Crossing in what's known as the Shibuya Scramble every two minutes. That's right, two and a half thousand. I know, it's crazy. I said hundreds but actually it's far more, yeah. Huge, thousands of people cross that. So that's famous for being definitely the busiest, possibly not the biggest but who knows, I mean, did it feel massive? It felt pretty big, yeah. It felt very urban, my goodness. Almost kind of not really British because they've
[00:48:57] taken it and made it something else. Well, it's still cute so it's crazy. And then the really famous one, I mean, in a way I was disappointed that there's only one really famous one in the UK, which is the Abbey Road Crossing. Of course, but iconic. Yeah. Yeah. A sort of genius. So the Abbey Road 11th studio album released by the Beatles, 1969, instant commercial success, selling 30 million copies.
[00:49:27] didn't have their name on the cover because they said, well, you don't need it. It's the four most famous people in the world on a zebra crossing. On a zebra crossing. Amazing. They took six photos only to produce that. Three with them walking in one direction and three with them walking in the other direction. And that was it. And it's became utterly iconic. So let me show you a picture of it now. Yes. And you can see. So there
[00:49:57] they are and they're walking across and of course, it's Paul who's barefoot. And he's sort of cigarette in his right hand, hasn't he? So famously they're dressed quite distinctively, I suppose, in that John Lennon is all in white, Ringo Starr is in black, George Harrison is in denim, isn't he? And then Paul McCartney is wearing a dark suit. Grey flannel suit, yeah. He's barefoot, grey flannel suit, yeah.
[00:50:27] So he's in grey and he's barefoot. And so there is, you know, one of these crazy, you know, there are conspiracy theories about rock albums all over the place that this, the Abbey Road one has bred this Paul is dead urban legend claiming that actually Paul McCartney died in 1966 in a car crash and was secretly replaced by a lookalike. So obviously it's total nonsense. The people who believe this, read this album cover for Clues. I mean,
[00:50:57] they will say it depicts the funeral procession, John Lennon in white is the clergyman, Ringo Starr in black is the mourner, George Harrison in denim is the grave digger and a barefoot out of step Paul McCartney is the corpse. So I think all this came as a surprise to Paul McCartney all these years, given that he is still hailing hearty. I saw him being interviewed only yesterday. It's interesting, isn't it? So maybe that is also part of the magic of the
[00:51:27] zebra crossing is to suggest all kinds of hallucinations. wonderful. It is wonderful. It's wonderful and I think there's a white VW Beetle just behind, which is just such a fabulous car as well to have in the background. Although apparently shortly after the album was released, the number plate was stolen from the car, as you expect. Anyway. Because of fandom. Because of fandom. So Muriel, there we are, fandom for the zebra
[00:51:56] crossing. Yes. Britain's gift to the world and all those people who didn't get run over because of it. Well, I think that is crucially, you know, because I was going to say, oh, it's great because I didn't really know about zebra crossings and thank you so much for telling me the story. And of course, that is not, I mean, it's important to me. A lot of listeners will be interested too, but ultimately what matters is far fewer fatalities. So we must be very grateful for that.
[00:52:26] How wonderful. And I love the story of the kind of seesawing of personal freedom against safety. I mean, it's something that we've encountered before with HiViz, for example. Yeah, I mean, we're looking for ways of being safe and for ways of being free. And that's how we live our lives on both sides of the channel. And we're very grateful to Baron Horbaleecia and George Charlesworth. Great men they were. And on that note,
[00:52:56] thank you, dear listeners. If you've enjoyed this episode, then please leave us a review, leave us a little message on the socials. We love to hear from you, tell your friends, make sure you email them a link so that they can also enjoy the episode, subscribe to the podcast. All these things are available to you. And I look forward to seeing you next time, Suzanne, for something completely different. Au revoir, Muriel. See you next time. Bye.