Dr. John V. N. Dorr, a metallurgist, chemical engineer, and protégé of Thomas Edison, founded an engineering firm that made him wealthy enough to establish the Dorr Foundation in 1940. Created to support advances in the fields of chemistry and metallurgy, the foundation initially funded a wide range of small projects.
Then Dorr’s wife, Nell, made an observation about drivers that charted a whole new course for the foundation. She pointed out that after dark, especially in bad weather, headlight glare from oncoming traffic made drivers either hug the centerline of the highway or swerve away from that line onto the soft shoulder of the road—sometimes with tragic consequences.
Thinking about the problem his wife had identified, Dorr became convinced that painting a white stripe on the far right side of the road to demarcate the outside edge of the pavement would not only minimize the threat to drivers, but also make pedestrians safer.
In 1953, his foundation began lobbying highway officials in Connecticut to test his theory on a stretch of the Merritt Parkway, a thirty-eight-mile scenic highway stretching from the New York border northeast to the Housatonic River, with the foundation underwriting the cost of the experiment. Results were positive, and soon the shoulders along the entire parkway were striped.
Impressed, officials in New York ran their own test on the Hutchinson River Parkway, which connected with the Merritt, and the results were equally compelling.
In the seven months prior to striping, there were 102 accidents with a total of 49 injuries. In the seven months after striping, there were only 46 accidents with 27 injuries: a 55 percent reduction. Long years of advocacy on the part of the Dorr Foundation ensued, with highway departments across the country reluctant to spend the $150 per mile needed to stripe a shoulder, only grudgingly accepting the mounting evidence of its effectiveness.
By the early 1960s, however, the highway shoulder line had gained near-universal acceptance and application across the country. As a result of the foundation’s money and more than a decade of relentless lobbying on Dorr’s part, an increasingly mobile population became a lot safer, and thousands upon thousands of lives were saved.
References
Give Smart: Philanthropy that Gets Results. Book by Joel Lawrence Fleishman and Thomas J. Tierney
