Traffic Trivia
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This traffic trivia quiz has 97 free questions with answers and covers the strange history of getting from A to B: the gas-lit signal outside Parliament that blew up in 1869, the policeman who cut the corners off a plank to make the first stop sign, the Swedish morning when every car crossed to the other side of the road, and the 100 km jam that lasted twelve days. It doubles as a set of driving trivia questions and answers for pub quizzes, road trips and driving-school icebreakers. Expect speed limits, seat belts, breathalysers, zebra and pelican crossings, cat's eyes, traffic cones, the Autobahn, Route 66, the M1 and the world's widest, busiest and deadliest roads, plus a little traffic science on gridlock, green waves and Braess's paradox. Every answer was checked against a reference page before publishing, so you can trust the facts as well as argue about them. Roughly a third of the questions are easy, a third medium and the rest are for people who know who Nils Bohlin was.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The world's first traffic signal, a gas-lit semaphore of 1868, stood outside which London landmark?
The Houses of Parliament
The Houses of Parliament: railway man John Peake Knight adapted a train signal so that MPs and other pedestrians could cross the road, and a police constable worked its arms and lamp by hand.
Q 02What fate befell the world's first gas-lit traffic signal only weeks after it was switched on in 1868?
It exploded
It exploded: a gas leak blew the signal up on 2 January 1869, injuring the police constable who was working it, and the experiment was taken down.
Q 03In which city did the American Traffic Signal Company install an electric traffic light at Euclid Avenue in August 1914?
Cleveland
Cleveland: the signal at Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street sounded a buzzer before each change, and police and fire stations could take control of it to clear a path in an emergency.
Q 04Which inventor patented a manually operated three-way traffic signal with moving arms in 1923?
Garrett Morgan
Garrett Morgan, already known for his smoke hood, designed the signal after seeing a horse-drawn carriage and a car collide at an intersection.
Q 05Which country decreed in 1973 that the 'go' light should be the bluest possible shade of green?
Japan
Japan: the Japanese word for the go light, ao, traditionally covered both blue and green, so a 1973 order specified the bluest permissible shade of green to match the name.
Q 06In which US city did the first stop sign go up?
Detroit
Detroit: in the 1920s highway officials ranked sign shapes by danger and gave stops the octagon, so that drivers could tell what a sign meant even when they couldn't read it.
Q 07Until a 1954 rule change made them red, US stop signs had spent thirty years as which colour?
Yellow
Yellow: red signs of the 1920s were too hard to see at night, so the 1924 standard put stop signs on yellow, and red took over only when fade-resistant reflective finishes arrived.
Q 08Traffic pioneer William Phelps Eno untangled which crash-prone Manhattan junction in 1905 by making it one-way?
Columbus Circle
Columbus Circle: carriages and cars had gone round it both ways, crashing almost daily, until Eno sent them one way; the author of New York's first traffic code never learned to drive.
Q 09The United Kingdom adopted which roundabout rule nationwide in 1966?
Entering traffic gives way to circulating traffic
Entering traffic gives way to circulating traffic: the rule is what separates a modern roundabout from its forerunners, which jammed at busy times and needed police to keep them moving.
Q 10The Magic Roundabout of 1972, five mini-roundabouts ringing a central island, is in which English town?
Swindon
Swindon: drivers go round the central island anticlockwise, against the normal British flow, and the junction took its name from a children's television show.
Q 11Which Midwestern suburb bills itself as America's roundabout capital, with more than 150 built since the late 1990s?
Carmel
Carmel has spent decades replacing its traffic signals with roundabouts, one junction after another, and now has more of them than any other city in the United States.
Q 12Britain's Locomotives Act of 1865 made someone walk ahead of each road locomotive carrying what?
A red flag
A red flag: the 'Red Flag Act' also held road locomotives to 4 mph at most, and though the flag was dropped in 1878, someone still had to walk in front until 1896.
Q 13Jacob German, arrested in Manhattan in May 1899 for doing 12 mph on Lexington Avenue, worked as what?
Cabbie
Q 21Britain's first motorway, the Preston By-pass, opened in December 1958 and shut within weeks after what damaged its surface?
Frost
Frost: water in the road froze and thawed, breaking up the surface, so the motorway that Harold Macmillan had opened on 5 December was closed again for repairs in January 1959.
Q 22The world's first parking meter, championed by lawyer and publisher Carl Magee, went into service in July 1935 in which city?
Oklahoma City
Oklahoma City: downtown workers were taking every kerb space all day, so the meters charged a nickel an hour to keep the spaces turning over for shoppers.
Q 23The 100 km traffic jam of August 2010, lasting more than a week, clogged a coal-truck route into which Chinese city?
Beijing
Cabbie: German drove one of the Electric Vehicle Company's battery-powered taxis, so the car in what is usually called America's first speeding arrest was electric.
Q 14The Emancipation Run of November 1896, celebrating a new 14 mph speed limit, took pioneer motorists from London to which seaside town?
Brighton
Brighton: the drive celebrated the Act that lifted the limit from walking pace, and it lives on as the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, a yearly outing for the very oldest cars.
Q 15Which country moved all its road traffic from the left side to the right at 5 a.m. on 3 September 1967?
Sweden
Sweden: Dagen H went ahead even though 83% of voters had rejected the change in a 1955 referendum; lawmakers overruled them because every neighbouring country already drove on the right.
Q 16Which island nation followed Dagen H by switching to driving on the right in May 1968?
Iceland
Iceland changed over on 26 May 1968, a day it called H-dagurinn; it had kept left even under Danish rule, and wartime British occupation had delayed an earlier plan to switch.
Q 17Which Pacific nation switched from right-hand to left-hand traffic in 2009?
Samoa
Samoa: on 7 September 2009 it became the first country since the 1970s to change sides, moving to the left so that islanders could import cheaper used cars from Australia and New Zealand.
Q 18Which country opened what is often called the world's first motorway in 1924?
Italy
Italy: Piero Puricelli's Autostrada dei Laghi linked Milan with Varese as a toll road for motor vehicles only, though this first motorway had just one lane in each direction.
Q 19Which US president, who had crossed the country in a slow 1919 army truck convoy, signed the act creating the Interstate system?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it in 1956: the 1919 convoy had needed 62 days to cross the country, and Germany's autobahns later showed him what fast roads could do for defence.
Q 20Route 66 began in Chicago and, after a 1930s extension, ended in which California city?
Santa Monica
Santa Monica: the highway first stopped in downtown Los Angeles before being pushed on towards the ocean; bypassed by the Interstates, it was removed from the US highway system in 1985.
Beijing: coal lorries from Inner Mongolia had worn the road out, and the repair works meant to fix that damage cut its capacity and set off the jam.
Q 24'Carmageddon' was the nickname for a July 2011 weekend closure of which Los Angeles freeway?
I-405
I-405: the 15-17 July 2011 closure through the Sepulveda Pass let crews demolish part of the Mulholland Drive bridge; traffic was lighter than feared and cyclists beat a JetBlue flight across town.
Q 25The word 'gridlock' spread from a New York City traffic engineer's memo during which 1980 event?
A transit strike
A transit strike: during New York's April 1980 transit strike, engineer Sam Schwartz's memo titled 'Gridlock Prevention Plan' was picked up by newspapers and the word spread nationwide.
Q 26Yorkshireman Percy Shaw made his name by patenting which night-driving aid in 1934?
Cat's eye road studs
Cat's eye road studs: each reflector sits in a rubber dome that a passing tyre presses down, wiping the glass clean, and the wartime blackout proved their worth on unlit roads.
Q 27The world's first zebra crossing was installed in 1951 in which English town?
Slough
Slough: the first zebra crossing opened on Slough High Street on 31 October 1951; the name is credited to James Callaghan, then a junior transport minister, who said the stripes looked like a zebra.
Q 28Belisha beacons are named after Leslie Hore-Belisha, who held which post in 1934?
Minister of Transport
Minister of Transport: with more than 7,000 people a year dying on Britain's roads, Hore-Belisha also brought in the driving test and a 30 mph limit in built-up areas.
Q 29Introduced in the UK in 1969, the pelican crossing takes its name from a compression of which phrase?
Pedestrian light controlled
Pedestrian light controlled: officials shortened it to 'pelicon', then changed the last syllable to match the bird; it replaced the panda crossing, an experiment that had failed.
Q 30In the American slang that produced 'jaywalker', what kind of person was a 'jay'?
A country bumpkin
A country bumpkin: a 'jay' was a gullible rustic lost in city traffic, and in the 1920s the motor industry spread 'jaywalker' to shift the blame for road deaths onto pedestrians.