Few people have had a greater or more positive impact on the way we drive than William Phelps Eno, known as the “father of road safety.” New York City native Eno – who invented the stop sign around the turn of the 20th century – once found inspiration for his career in a horse-drawn carriage traffic jam he experienced as a child in Manhattan in 1867: “There were only about a dozen horses and carriages involved, and all it took was a little order to keep the traffic moving,” he later wrote. “Yet no one was quite sure what to do; neither the drivers nor the police knew anything of directing traffic.”
After his father’s death in 1898 left him a multimillion-dollar legacy, Eno devoted himself to creating a field that otherwise didn’t exist: traffic management. He developed the first traffic plans for New York, Paris and London. In 1921, he founded the Washington, D.C.-based Eno Center for Transportation, a research foundation on multimodal transportation issues that still exists today. However, one thing Eno failed to do is learn to drive. Perhaps because he had such extensive knowledge of them, Eno distrusted cars and preferred riding horses. He died in Connecticut at the age of 86 in 1945 having never driven a car.
