Glow-in-the-Dark Roads Make Debut in Netherlands

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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About all you can say about glow-in-the dark roads is ‘wow! that is so cool’. The Netherlands have replaced streetlights with luminescent paint that glows in the dark as a test to see how well the paint holds up to weather and the cost differential between the paint and regular streetlights. Hopefully the paint test will prove positive and the technology will be adapted by more countries. :cool:
 
The dynamic paint they have pictured in the article would be way more distracting that useful.
 
I think the stripes look cool, so do the snow flakes, but they can put the snow flakes about every 500 feet or so (maybe even further, depending on the speed limit). We don't need a constant reminder that ice may be present.
 
As a long time motorcyclist, all painted stripes I've ever encountered are slippery when wet, even though they supposedly throw sand on the paint.

Hopefully this isn't the case for their snow flakes, or they'd end up creating more accidents than they solve.
 
Roosegaarde told Wired.co.uk that Heijmans had managed to take its luminescence to the extreme—"it's almost radioactive", said Roosegaarde. You can get some sense of that in this embedded tweet, which appears to show three stripes of varying shades of radioactive green along both the highway's edges.
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that is a word people want to see used to describe a road, it is radioactive.
 
Around where I live they actually put a type of reflector in the road. The paint seem like a good idea for highways but I would rather have streetlights in residential areas to help deter theft and vandalism.
 
This will only work when people actually turn the car lights on. I've seen a lot of people driving around at night with no lights on at all.
 
halo000008 said:
Around where I live they actually put a type of reflector in the road. The paint seem like a good idea for highways but I would rather have streetlights in residential areas to help deter theft and vandalism.
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Those reflectors are meant for you to see the lanes, not to replace street lights thought.

I kind of like this for rural sections of main roads as it would add some color to them. I hate when they pave roads as the new asphalt is pitch black. which headlights do little good when the road is black as you don't see anything. they need to mix something in to give it a little bit of color so that light actually has something to reflect off of. I do think that something like this would help that as you would have at least something there to help light up the roads better. but do not think that this should 100% replace street lights. one of the main reasons is that you are looking at something like under 5 degrees it warns you of snow, that is great when you can actually see the road.

In some places you don't actually see the road for a few months of the year. So there this would be worthless. Just like when places decided on this great idea of using LED traffic lights to save power. They then realized that in some areas the heat from the bulbs is what keeps them from freezing over. So they go with lower power / low heat lights and they started to freeze over. So they had to either go back to the old style or design some type of heater to go inside of the housing so that when cold it would turn on to warm up the traffic light.

There are some ideas that are great in some places where it is nice and sunny all year around. But in some places you don't have much sun or you don't have nice weather. So not all changes work the same in all areas.

Actually kind of wish there was a video of this actually in use instead of just the crappy cg stuff they had in the article.
 
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did find a real picture. yeah, that won't replace street lights for actually seeing, but would outline lanes nicely.
 
odd it removed part of the domain name from my attempt at posting the picture. tried a few more times and did a preview, even just tried to post the link and kept doing the same thing.

So I will do it this way. This guy has a picture on his twitter page. for some reason the forum doesn't like t w i m g . c o m and keeps removing that form the url if I try to just post the picture.

https://twitter.com/MaximeVerhagen/status/454342628822495233/photo/1
 
never happen in the USA, would be too expensive and we can;t upgrade roads as it is.
 
Bigbacon said:
never happen in the USA, would be too expensive and we can;t upgrade roads as it is.
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they repaint roads as it is. this part would just be putting something into the paint that they put down. so the lines wouldn't be that bad. stuff in the middle of the road (snow flakes) would be more costly as it would require more work. The other two features (windmill lights and lights that turn off and on as cars pass) would be very expensive.

So of the 4 things they hope to do, I can see maybe this one being possible in some areas as they repaint roads if it doesn't add to the cost of the paint too much.
 
May I now introduce: The Bridge Color Problem:

http://www.flounder.com/bridge.htm

tl;dr: If the paint costs significantly more, even if the long term cost of the glow-in-the-dark paint is less (less accidents, etc), since the cheaper up front cost for traditional paint is easier to fit into state and federal budgets, government will stick with the larger long term costs.
 
Well it certainly would be useful here because whatever method they currently use in Michigan turns nearly invisible at night with even the smallest amount of rain
 
So ummm is this like most glow-in-the-dark stuff, 30 seconds after light goes away it goes dark? Or is this just an extremely reflective material that relies on headlights illuminating it?
 
sfsuphysics said:
So ummm is this like most glow-in-the-dark stuff, 30 seconds after light goes away it goes dark? Or is this just an extremely reflective material that relies on headlights illuminating it?
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If what they claim is true, it absorbs light during the day and then at night glows for at least 8 hours. not sure what they are using to get that amount of time out of it.
 
Ducman69 said:
As a long time motorcyclist, all painted stripes I've ever encountered are slippery when wet, even though they supposedly throw sand on the paint.

Hopefully this isn't the case for their snow flakes, or they'd end up creating more accidents than they solve.
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The snow flakes are not actually deployed... but I don''t think they make sense.. much cheaper would be solar-powered warning signs here and there...
The stripes I think are a good idea, maybe they will reduce light use.. not sure about eliminating it.. I suppose it depends of the situation (snow, long nights that type of thing).. Rural stretches of road already have not illuminations where I am at, so no savings there.

What would be neat it to paint in rainbow colors, so with everything else dark, it would be mario kart's rainbow road!
I guess one would need to lift the road so you fall to nowhere on the sides, and a turtle on a could with a fishing rod places you back on the road.
 
It has always seemed strange, to me, that they paint lane dividers in white, here in the great white north. This type of paint looks like a good idea to me or maybe just change the colour of the paint to be different than the colour of the weather we get for a significant portion of the year.
 
halo000008 said:
Around where I live they actually put a type of reflector in the road. The paint seem like a good idea for highways but I would rather have streetlights in residential areas to help deter theft and vandalism.
Click to expand...

And see pedestrians. No, I'm not a freak for thinking of the other guy, you know what hitting one does to your insurance? Totally fueled by self interest.
 
now we just need to make LED traffic lights that can dim a little bit on rainy nights so we can still see the lane lines on the (wet shiny LED-illuminated) blacktop roads.


or am i the only one that has this problem?
 
Ducman69 said:
As a long time motorcyclist, all painted stripes I've ever encountered are slippery when wet, even though they supposedly throw sand on the paint.

Hopefully this isn't the case for their snow flakes, or they'd end up creating more accidents than they solve.
Click to expand...

Sand? What would be the logic in "throwing" sand on the paint? It's glass beads.
 
How about just make solar powered street lights, they sit there and charge all day, and glow at night. Cuts down the electric bill and keeps people safe at night. :rolleyes::cool:

Or, come up with glow in the dark pedestrians? :eek::p
 
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