As urban centers began to grow in size, and more intersections meant more danger of accidents, the bigger cities realized they had to do something before people and goods were permanently damaged. The first attempt at regulating traffic took the form of wooden semaphore signs erected in London, England, in 1868 and operated from the side of the street, by policemen. These proved a reasonable answer to the immediate problem, and eventually exported to America, which began using them in 1908.

It was a sensible choice, since the operators could change the signals as traffic demanded. But technology and progress were marching along, and by 1914, electrically operated traffic lights began to take over, with the last manual signal in Brooklyn, replaced in 1932.

This system was the mainstay of traffic control as civilization gradually went from horse to horseless carriage and then convertibles. Up until the 1970s, most traffic systems were run on electronics that provided dials for timing, and pins to dictate the cycles, and eventually lights with multiple dials to accommodate changes in traffic density.

But the winds of change were already blowing, and in 1963, the city of Toronto, Canada installed the first set of computerized traffic controls. The boom in manufacturing microprocessors brought about a concurrent explosion in scores of systems that were, unfortunately, incompatible with each other. Eventually the market developed standard communication protocols and things worked smoothly once more. Until 2002, when Houston, Texas rolled out the first IP-based communication system for the operation of traffic lights.