Drawing the line on highway safety
April 24, 2002: A five-mile section of Interstate 10 in Indio was dedicated to honor June McCarroll, a pioneering doctor who successfully campaigned to have center lines painted on roadways to improve safety.
The Riverside County physician, who was known as Dr. June, was driving home one day in 1917 when a truck forced her car off the road.
Convinced that lines would help drivers stay safely on the correct sides of the road, McCarroll took her idea to Riverside County’s Board of Supervisors and Chamber of Commerce.
When they didn’t do anything, she set an example by painting a mile-long, 4-inch-wide white stripe down the center of Indio Boulevard, near her home. The California Highway Commission later adopted the lines.
“When I gave this idea to an accident-ridden world, it was with no thought of honors -- only safety for drivers of automobiles,” McCarroll once said.
She died in 1954, before seeing the Doctor June McCarroll Memorial Freeway named for her.
The credit for painting white traffic arrows on pavement, incidentally, apparently belongs to George S. Hinckley, a traffic engineer who first used them in the plaza in front of Redlands City Hall in 1910.
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