Although it is sensible to stop at the junction for a number of seconds it is not the law in New Zealand according to the Land Transport Act and as such you cannot be fined for coming to a stop and starting again.
So long as you STOP you cannot be fined BUT please do take time at a stop junction and double check, especially for motorcyclists.
4.1 Giving way where vehicles are controlled by stop sign or give-way sign
(1) A driver approaching or entering a place where the vehicles moving in the direction in which the driver is travelling are controlled by a stop sign must—
(a) stop his or her vehicle before entering the path of any possible vehicle flow at such a position as to be able to ascertain whether the way is clear for the driver to proceed; and
(b) give way to any vehicles that are approaching or crossing the place and that are not controlled by a stop sign.
(2) A driver approaching or entering a place where the vehicles moving in the direction in which the driver is travelling are controlled by a give-way sign must give way to any vehicles that are approaching or crossing the place and that are not controlled by either a stop sign or a give-way sign.
(3)A driver approaching a section of road suitable for travel in only 1 direction and controlled by a one-way give-way sign at or near the section must give way to vehicles on or approaching the section.
The Stop Sign Was Invented by a Detroit Police Sergeant Who Was Tired of Waving His Arms. Then It Took 40 Years to Agree on What Colour It Should Be.
The most recognisable traffic sign on earth has a genuinely strange origin story, a four decade argument about colour, and a UN treaty. No ancient civilisations required.
In 1914, a Detroit police sergeant named Harold "Harry" Jackson was stationed at a particularly brutal intersection. One of the approach streets had a blind turn that forced him to manually slow and hold traffic every single shift. At some point, Jackson did what practical men do when a problem irritates them long enough. He found a piece of rectangular plywood, trimmed the corners to give it a distinct shape, painted STOP across the centre in bold black letters, and nailed it up facing the hazardous street.
It worked. Traffic flow improved. Fellow officers noticed. The idea spread across the city. By 1915, Michigan had formally adopted the concept statewide, and the stop sign was born, per Wikipedia's documented history of the sign, cross referenced with the Traffic Safety Resource Center.
What Jackson created looked nothing like what you passed on the way to work this morning. It was a 24 by 24 inch white square with black lettering. No octagon. No red. No reflective coating. A flat, hand painted board that would barely register at speed in daylight, let alone at night.
The Chaos Before Anyone Agreed on Anything
The wider context matters here. In the early 1900s, American roads were genuinely anarchic. No speed limits. No lane markings. No driver licensing in most states. No directional signage. If a municipality or individual wanted to put up a road sign, they made whatever they liked. The result, as documented in AAA's archive of the period, included a 40 foot sign in Tennessee reading "DRIVE SLOW, DANGEROUS AS THE DEVIL" and another warning drivers with a skull and crossbones and the instruction "DANGER GO SLO."
William Phelps Eno, a New York businessman who also invented the one way street, the traffic circle, and the taxi stand, had been pushing for systematic road sign standardisation since the late 1800s. His version of the stop sign was also a white square with black lettering, but his broader argument, that road signage needed national consistency to be effective, was the one that eventually stuck.
By the early 1920s, with automobile ownership expanding rapidly across the country, stop signs varied so dramatically in appearance that drivers in one state could arrive in another and face entirely unfamiliar signage. The American Association of State Highway Officials convened in 1922 to fix that.
Why an Octagon
The 1922 committee had a specific engineering problem to solve. They needed a shape that could not be confused with any other road sign, that a driver could identify from a distance, and critically, that could be recognised from behind. That last requirement is more important than it sounds. A driver approaching an intersection needs to know, before reaching it, that drivers coming the other way are facing a stop command. A unique shape visible from both sides accomplishes that. A rectangle or square, shared with dozens of other sign types, does not.
The octagon solved every requirement simultaneously. Eight sides gave it a silhouette unlike anything else on the road. Approaching from the back, drivers could identify it immediately. In an era before reflective materials, its unusual geometry made it distinguishable by shape alone in poor light conditions.
The 1922 committee also formalised a logic for the hierarchy of shapes that remains in use today: the more sides a sign carries, the higher the danger level it signals. A circle, with theoretically infinite sides, was designated for railroad crossings, the most dangerous intersections on the network. The octagon, second only to the circle in complexity, was assigned to full stops. Triangles warned. Rectangles informed.
As Insure on the Spot's documented history of the sign's shape notes, the octagon "couldn't be mistaken for any other sign" and was a deliberate engineering decision rather than an aesthetic one.
By 1924, the octagonal stop sign was the national standard in the United States. Problem solved.
Except for the colour.
The Forty Year Argument About Red
Here is the detail that surprises almost everyone: stop signs were not red until 1954. For three decades after the octagon was standardised, the official American stop sign was yellow.
The reason was entirely practical. Fade resistant red pigments that could survive outdoor exposure did not exist in commercially viable form until the early 1950s. Early red signs looked black at night, defeating their entire purpose. Yellow, by contrast, offered high visibility in daylight and remained legible after dark. So yellow it was, first with black lettering, then with red lettering as interim solutions were tried.
The 1935 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the first federal attempt to unify American road signage nationally, specified octagonal stop signs with red or black lettering on a yellow background. The MUTCD, as it became known, went through eight revisions between 1935 and 1971, each time nudging the stop sign incrementally closer to the design we know.
The 1954 edition finally made the call. Retroreflective red coatings had arrived. The technology now existed to produce a sign that was genuinely red in daylight and remained visible at night. The 1954 MUTCD states directly, as quoted in AAA's historical research, that "the original decision to standardize on a yellow background for the stop sign, rather than on the more logical red, was based largely on the unavailability of red pigments that would not fade on exposure." With that problem solved, red became mandatory. By 1966, the last non standard stop signs in the United States were eliminated.
The red we now associate so instinctively with stopping that the connection feels ancient and obvious was, for most of the stop sign's existence, not red at all.
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Going Global: Vienna, 1968
By the late 1960s, post war prosperity had put millions of Europeans behind wheels, and cross border road travel was increasing fast. A driver moving between France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy could encounter four different systems of road signage. The United Nations Economic and Social Council convened a Conference on Road Traffic in Vienna in October 1968 to fix it.
The result was the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, signed by 31 countries on November 8, 1968, and entering into force in 1978. The convention adopted the red octagonal stop sign as the international standard, specifying that the word STOP appear in either English or the country's national language. It set out precise dimensions: 600, 900, or 1,200 millimetre versions depending on road type and traffic speed.
Seventy one countries are now contracting parties, per Wikipedia's account of the convention. The United States and Canada never ratified it, continuing with their own MUTCD standard, which is functionally identical in appearance if not in formal legal origin. Japan uses an inverted red triangle. Zambia and Zimbabwe used a disc with a black cross until 2016.
But for the majority of the world's drivers, the Vienna Convention is why the sign looks the same in Oslo and Osaka, in Nairobi and Naples.
What Harry Jackson Actually Built
The stop sign is, in retrospect, one of the most consequential pieces of design in transport history. A single piece of visual communication, standardised across most of the planet, that has prevented an incalculable number of collisions simply by being the same shape, the same colour, in the same place, doing the same job everywhere a driver encounters it.
It took a Detroit sergeant's improvisation, a decade of national chaos, a 1922 standards committee, a four decade argument about pigments, and a UN treaty to get there.
Jackson never knew any of that. He just wanted to stop waving his arms at a dangerous corner. The plywood worked, so he told his colleagues. The rest, at the pace these things move, followed fairly quickly.