Green light sought for traffic signals

May 11, 1911: LAPD Sgt. John L. Butler, who had organized the city’s first traffic squad a few years earlier, asked the Los Angeles City Council’s Finance Committee if it would consider replacing police “whistle-men” with traffic signals. “The patrolmen are not complaining,” he said, “but I know it must be tough on them to blow whistles all day.”

Before signals, a single whistle blast by “leather-lunged” traffic policemen meant all wagons, automobiles, trolley cars and pedestrians should “move east and west.” Two blasts meant north and south. “At three blasts of the whistle all traffic stops.”