White Lines Will Guide You

Jul 28

In a recent Wall Street Journal article (paywall), columnist Ben Cohen highlighted a man almost none of us have ever heard of: John Van Nostrand Dorr. Dorr championed a simple invention that quietly keeps us safe every day, yet most of us never think about it.

Any guesses?

The stop sign? Nope.

Peanut butter. Not quite.

AI algorithms that will summarize boring newsletters for you? Hahaha no.

It's the simple white line painted along the edge of the road.

In the early days of the automobile, roads were dark and often poorly marked. Drivers struggled to tell where the pavement ended and the shoulder began, especially at night. Dorr believed a simple painted line along the edge of the road could change that.

Many dismissed the idea as unnecessary or too expensive. But Dorr spent years advocating for it, convinced that something so ordinary could save lives. He was right.

In one of the earliest large-scale studies of edge lines, Ohio randomly selected which roads would receive them by flipping a coin. A year later, the roads with painted edge lines experienced 37% fewer fatal and injury crashes than the unmarked roads. Today, millions of people make it home safely because of a few inches of paint we've become so accustomed to that we hardly notice them.

We tend to remember the mountaintop moments—the promotion, the graduation, the trip, the breakthrough conversation. Those experiences matter, but they're rarely what shape us most. More often, it's the ordinary practices we hardly notice.

Reading to your children before bed.

Taking a walk after dinner.

Sharing a meal without your phone.

Writing in a journal.

Checking in on a friend.

Choosing to ask one more question instead of assuming you know the answer.

None of those moments feel particularly significant on their own. Yet over months and years they become the quiet habits that keep us moving in the right direction. Like the white line along the edge of the road, they're easy to overlook precisely because they've become such faithful guides.

John Dorr dedicated years of his life to a simple conviction: that something ordinary could also be profoundly important.

What are the quiet practices, faithful people, or ordinary rhythms that have guided you for so long you've almost stopped noticing them?