We have two excellent articles on the Dictionary by writer and curator Megan Hicks: Reading the Roads and The Decorated Footpath. So we were thrilled to have Megan in the chair on 2SER Breakfast this morning discussing pedestrian crossings with Mitch Byatt. In the early days of the colony, streets were laid out in the city but were not sealed so in wet weather they turned to mud, and in dry weather horse-drawn carts and carriages threw up clouds of dust, much of it powdered horse manure. People who walked the streets were referred to as foot passengers, not pedestrians. The term pedestrian originally meant a person taking part in a foot race and wasn't used to mean ordinary people walking about until much late. By the 1850s many Sydney streets had kerbs and gutters and many 'footways' had been flagged with stones for people to walk on. Streets started being paved with wood blocks in the 1880s, but it was many decades before all streets and roads in Sydney were paved. In wet weather, open gutter crossings allowed people on foot to cross over the streams of water running down gutters, and foot crossings - consisting of a kind of path from one side of the street to the other – meant that pedestrians could cross without wading through mud. As traffic in the streets became thicker, drivers of horse-drawn vehicles complained about pedestrians not using the footways, and pedestrians were expected to cross busy streets at intersections. Pedestrians did not necessarily conform. Things got serious when motorcars came on the scene. Pedestrians still thought they could go on crossing the street wherever they pleased, but motorists thought they should keep off the road. There were many accidents and injuries. To control of traffic, lines were marked with paint or metal studs at intersections where vehicles were supposed to stop to let cross traffic through, and these same lines indicated where pedestrians were supposed to cross, that is, at the corner of intersections. By the late 1920s, actual pedestrian crossings as we know them were being painted consisting of two parallel lines across the roadway, roughly three metres apart, to keep pedestrians from straying wider across the road. Crossings were no longer for the convenience of pedestrians. Instead they were places where pedestrians were herded together to cross the street, to make using the streets more convenient for drivers of vehicles. Pedestrians, of course, were defiant then, and are still defiant and impatient today. Some statistics suggest that in Sydney a pedestrian is struck by a vehicle every day in the city. Meanwhile, the look of pedestrian crossings has evolved from parallel white lines across the street to yellow dotted parallel lines then, in the 1950s, to yellow painted zebra crossings. Yellow paint was replaced by white paint in the mid-1980s and these days crossings are marked with water-based thermo-plastic which lasts longer and is less polluting than the petro-chemical solvent paints that were formerly used.

From time to time, people paint DIY crossings where they think a crossing ought to be. Unfortunately, painters of DIY pedestrian crossings generally use house paint, which wears away quickly. In 1999 a DIY crossing apeared in Wilson Street, Newtown, where there was none. Later, at this spot, an official pedestrian crossing was installed, and some time later traffic lights. Have you ever seen a pedestrian crossing painted in a place where someone thinks there ought to be one? --- If you missed our regular Dictionary spot on 2SER Breakfast this morning, you can catch up here. Many thanks for today, Megan. Be sure to tune in again next week to hear more Sydney history. 8:20am, 107.3 FM. Have a great week! --- If you enjoyed today's topic, you can explore more of Megan's obsession on her blog Pavement Graffiti: http://www.meganix.net