The good oil: Roading history lesson

One of the oldest former "residents" of bushfire-ravaged Marysville has given A$20,000 ($25,000) towards rebuilding the town. A 1927 Packard 426 Roadster that was once housed in the town's museum - one of the few buildings left standing - has sold for A$36,000 at auction in Melbourne. The car's owner immediately pledged A$20,000 from the sale to the Victorian Bushfire Appeal.

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More than 40 per cent of Volkswagen's sixth-generation Golf is made of recycled material, says the carmaker. The new car weighs around 1300kg - 527kg of which has been used before. Germany's standards watchdog TUV signed off on VW's figure, breaking down the recycled material to 501kg of metals, 15kg of plastics, 9kg of glass, and 2kg of oils. The Golf VI arrives here in June.

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Overheard in the Koru Club at Wellington Airport, a handful of men in suits talking about driving to and from Auckland's airport. Said one: "The wowsers who dominated Auckland city politics for so long after the war had no knowledge of history, therefore no vision of the future. The Iraqis were building roads to move people around cities thousands of years before Auckland got busy."

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Yep, the man in the grey flannel suit is right. A Google search reveals that stone-paved streets were being built in Ur, in modern-day Iraq, around 4000BC. Timber roads preserved in a swamp in Glastonbury, England, date from that time too.

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More on roading history: Scotsman John Metcalfe (born 1717) built about 300km of roads in Yorkshire, England, in the mid-18th century. He was blind but his roads were built with three layers to help drain water. Fellow Scotsmen Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam were responsible for modern, tarred roads. Telford (born 1757) came up with raising the foundation of the road in the centre to help drain water more efficiently. McAdam (born 1756) used stones laid in symmetrical, tight patterns and covered with small stones to create a hard surface. His method, called "macadam roads", is acknowledged as the most significant step in road building.

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The first use of asphalt appeared in 1824, when asphalt blocks were placed on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. The use of asphalt in the US was the work of Belgian immigrant Edward de Smedt, who laid the new surface on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 1872 and on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, in 1877.

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The first traffic light was a manual gas lamp used in London in 1868. It lasted a month before it exploded. There is some debate about the first electric traffic light. One story claims it first appeared in Berlin in the 1880s. Another that it was invented by a policeman named Lester Wire in Utah, in 1912. New York City got 75 electric traffic lights in 1925. By 1934 it had 7700. The first automatic Don't Walk signs were installed in New York City on February 5, 1952.

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The city of Syracuse, in New York state, had to reverse the colours on the first traffic light it installed - Irish immigrants in the 1920s kept pulling it down because they did not like British red being above Irish green. The city's Irish suburb of Tip Hill still calls modern lights "upside down lights". Every St Patrick's Day, residents will splash green paint on roads at traffic lights.

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Pretty much every state in the US allows a right turn on a red light, traffic permitting - and after coming to a stop. Massachusetts was the last state to adopt this rule back in the late 1970s, when the US Federal Government threatened to withhold highway funds from states that didn't allow right-on-red, as the energy conservation measure was called.

alastair.sloane@nzherald.co.nz