Road users come in all different forms, there are pedestrians, horse riders, cyclists and of course, drivers. The Highway Code is seen by all of these road users as the default set of rules for correct road behaviour.

Although in 1930 there were only around 2 million motorcars on the roads, there were over 7000 deaths from car accidents. When you compare that to the 2006 statistics, (20 million cars, 3200 deaths from car accidents) it seems that road deaths were staggeringly high.

The government of the day knew that they needed to do something about this, thus the Highway Code was born. Now nearly 80 years old, it has had a lot of changes made to it over the years considering that the original version of the Code contained information about things like what actions to take when driving your carriage and horses, and was only 24 pages long!

The original version of the Code was very limited, but then so were the laws of the road in comparison to today so I suppose that is to be expected. There were no road signs when the Code first came out, and nobody had thought twice about driving after drinking, or when tired, so you can see, the Code still had a long way to go. Even among the 15 road signs that were included in the second edition (1946), there are only two that we use today.

Braking distances did not come into the equation until the second version either. Even then they were just in a plain chart type display. Images were not used to show stopping distances until the 1954 version, along with another 16 roadsigns, bringing the total to 31, which compared to today’s 170, who knows what road signs will look like in another 60 years.

The first version to include photographs and 3D images was the sixth version which came out in 1968, and these images were used to show braking distances. It also introduced the orange badges for disabled people and gave the Green Cross Code to pedestrians.

Then, the theory driving test was introduced in The 90’s, along with an update to the Code to include the information that new drivers need to pass it, hence this has now become part of the code itself.

The Highway Code has been adapted over the 78 years that it has been with us to become the comprehensive book on road advice, guidelines and law. One of the newest of which being the fact that you cannot use mobile phones while driving, and considering mobile phones weren’t invented when the Code was originally brought out, it just shows how the laws of the road have adapted and changed with society.

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