CANADA'S FIRST TRAFFIC ACCIDENT

In June 24, 1866, Father Antoine Belcourt, parish priest at South Rustico, purchased a steam powered automobile from the USA. Belcourt undertook to demonstrate the machine on the occasion of the parish picnic on June 24, 1866. The machine went out of control, ran off the road, went through a fence, and rolled over, thus creating what we have called the first traffic accident in Canada.

In 1913, Ontario Motor League starts its Road Signing Program. By 1937, more than 200,000 road signs are erected on Ontario highways by OML.


FIRST CROSS-CANADA TRIPS BY CAR

In 1912, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney drove their four-cylinder REO from Halifax to Victoria. The trip took 52 days. "Roads were bad", Mr. Haney wrote in his diary on just the second day of the expedition. By the time they reached Ontario, the roads were "rotted, full of deep holes. Had to ford two creeks today, bridges out." Where there were no roads, Wilby either hoisted his automobile onto a railway flatcar or simply drove bumpily over the railway ties.

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In 1925, at the age of 64, Perry Doolittle, founder of CAA, drove a Canadian-built Model T Ford from Halifax to Vancouver. He carried a commemorative scroll that was signed by mayors of towns and cities along the 7,670 km route. On the morning of September 8, the Model T was backed into the Atlantic on a sandy strip of beach near Halifax. Forty days later, on October 17, 1925, the front wheels were dipped into the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver. There were only a few hundred kms of paved roads in Canada at the time, mainly in or near the larger cities. In the Maritimes, Doolittle and his Model T pushed through roads so narrow that tree branches and bushes scraped the sides of the car. In Northern Ontario, the pace slowed to less than 30 kms a day as the car crawled over rocks and through mud holes. Later came stretches of prairie mud and a spine-chilling descent through the Rockies on roads designed for horse drawn wagons. The Model T, which proved to be remarkably hardy, never-theless averaged 190 kms a day for the entire trip and suffered only four punctures. On 14 occasions, the car's rub-ber wheels were replaced with steel flanged rims so that it could be driven along the transcontinental railway lines. Of the 7,670 kms covered, some 1,365 kms were done on the rails. The arrival in Vancouver marked the first successful comple-tion of a cross-Canada trip by a car under its own power, without leaving Canadian soil.

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A trans-Canada motor trip was not possible until a Canadian highway link was completed in 1943.

Then in May of 1946, Brigadier R.A. Macfarlane, DSO, and Squadron Leader K.A. MacGillivary dipped the rear wheels of a new post-war Chevrolet in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean at Louisbourg, NS, and nine days and 4,743 miles (7636 km) later, dipped the front wheels in the Pacific Ocean at Victoria. By this accomplishment, Macfarlane and MacGillivary were the recipients of the A.E. Todd Gold Medal first offered in 1912 by the then mayor of Victoria.


KEEP RIGHT

Until the 1920s, the rule of the road in Canada varied from province to province, with British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island having cars driving on the left, and the other provinces and territories having motorists driving on the right. Between 1920 and 1923, these provinces' motorists were made to drive on the right. Newfoundland was not part of Canada until 1949, its motorists drove on the left until 1947.


WHY ARE TRAFFIC LIGHTS RED, GREEND AND YELLOW?

The choice of these colors for traffic signals was based on the colors used as signals to control the trains. RED was an obvious choice for stop. For millennia red has been the color of danger in the wild; red is the color of blood. If it is necessary to stop something, red will get the attention. The other two colors could have been any color and, in fact, there were some changes made in the early days of railroad traffic. Originally GREEN was the color for caution and WHITE or CLEAR meant go. This had problems from the beginning because the white lights in other lights such as street lamps or even stars could easily be confused with the WHITE go signal. The signals lights were colored by using RED, GREEN and CLEAR filters. One railroad crash was caused when the RED filter of a stop signal fell out leaving only the white bulb signalling go. After these experiences, railroad engineers suggested changes. RED would be the stop signal; GREEN, the go; and YELLOW, caution. Under these rules if a lens ever did fall out, the white light would indicate to the engineer that something was amiss.


WORLD'S FIRST PNEUMATIC TYRE

The world’s 1st pneumatic tyre was invented in 1888, in Belfast, by John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon by profession. He was watching his son ride his tricycle. Noticing that his son was encountering difficulty and discomfort while riding over cobbled ground, Dunlop realized that this was because of the vehicle's solid rubber tires and began looking for a way to improve them.