Glow In The Dark Roads Not Glowing

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It seems that glow in the dark roads work best when the glow in the dark paint isn't sensitive to stuff like rain and humidity. Whoops!

Civil engineering firm Heijmans, which is running the pilot project with interactive artist Daan Roosegaarde, confirmed to the BBC that the road markings were sensitive to large amounts of moisture due to rainfall. This meant the road markings were not giving out a consistent level of light.
 
You know, someone should have thought of a "soak" test, you know, because of rain...

It amazes me sometimes the lack of testing that goes into things.
 
You know, someone should have thought of a "soak" test, you know, because of rain...

It amazes me sometimes the lack of testing that goes into things.

This is the test. What did you think a test is?
 
Really thought this sounded awesome; also thought of the old adage, "If it's too good to be true..."
 
It's refreshing to see a government actually able to put together a pilot test like this without all the red tape, cost, and bureaucracy that we're all used to here in the US. They are able to inspect and adapt even. good for them.
 
It's refreshing to see a government actually able to put together a pilot test like this without all the red tape, cost, and bureaucracy that we're all used to here in the US. They are able to inspect and adapt even. good for them.

agreed. when your country is sinking (literally) you really need to get your shit together.
 
You know, someone should have thought of a "soak" test, you know, because of rain...

It amazes me sometimes the lack of testing that goes into things.
There's no test environment like prod. :p
 
clear coat sealant, glow in the dark paint, clear coat sealant... apply on a dry sunny day, problem solved.
 
You know, someone should have thought of a "soak" test, you know, because of rain...

It amazes me sometimes the lack of testing that goes into things.

There's no test environment like prod. :p

Like somebody else pointed out this is the test, so the two of you might want to do a little more looking into what you are refering to. They put it down on something like 500m of road to see how it worked.
 
This is the test. What did you think a test is?

There's no jerk like kneejerk.

Internet rule: Read headline, start foaming at the mouth and proceed directly to comments without bothering to read the story.
 
This is the test. What did you think a test is?
It never should have even gotten this far. This is such a pre-alpha type of test that governments shouldn't have ever even been approached with the idea if it fails a simple moisture test. This is something you slap on a driveway and notice right away... not something you market to the government that is all gungho about implementing this nation wide before they do their own test and realize its crap.
 
clear coat sealant, glow in the dark paint, clear coat sealant... apply on a dry sunny day, problem solved.
Then it rains, and motorcycles are wiping out on the slick wet clearcoat finish every time they cross a line or try to brake over one of those large painted road arrows.

The point is to enhance safety, not glow in the dark for the sake of glow in the dark.

Besides, LED technology and headlights in general are improving at such an astounding rate that this is becoming moot anyway. In no time for very little power draw we can turn the night into day, to where existing reflective technology stripes are more than sufficient.

Have you seen some of the reflexite tape for example? That stuff has insane levels of reflectivity.
 
It seems that glow in the dark roads work best when the glow in the dark paint isn't sensitive to stuff like rain and humidity. Whoops!
Steve did you ever heard of prototype testing, they only tested it on 500m of road.

To get the real story:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/glow-in-the-dark-roads-make-debut-in-netherlands/
http://arstechnica.com/information-...-glowing-highway-gets-a-temporary-lights-off/

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glow_in_the_dark_road_markers_t.jpg
 
It never should have even gotten this far. This is such a pre-alpha type of test that governments shouldn't have ever even been approached with the idea if it fails a simple moisture test. This is something you slap on a driveway and notice right away... not something you market to the government that is all gungho about implementing this nation wide before they do their own test and realize its crap.

How does that help? The issue isn't that the paint washes off or that it doesn't work at all. If there is a lot of water not all areas glow the same. Looking at a 1 foot line you wouldn't have enough to look at. You need a longer stretch of paint to see any results to be able to see this 1 foot of road is not glowing as bright as the rest of the road. Given that the paint is meant to work in areas of no light you can't test it outdoors in a parking lot as most have street lights or some other source of light which defeats the purpose. So you need a section of road out in the middle of nowhere. So you could pay to build a 1/2 mile road in the middle of no where, have it paved and then have nobody ever around it which doesn't really do you any good. OR you work with the highway department and put in on a section of rural highway for testing and see how it actually works in real life. in this case they find an issue so they are making some changes to the paint and will try again.

Unless you're buying watercolors, most paint is waterproof.

not even close to the issue here.
 
i think it's a good idea, but do think that something like waterproofness would have been tested in the lab.
 
This road is a test road, the government regularly test new ideas on this 500m stretch of road.
 
i think it's a good idea, but do think that something like waterproofness would have been tested in the lab.
This is just a test, to see what they done in the lab also works in the real world.

Its even more like a (pre-) Alpha then a Beta test, its ware its ware the R and the D of R&D meet.

They really are not having a you're holding it wrong moment, of the thousand's of kilometers/miles of road they have in the Netherlands, all they did was a 500m/550yard test, in a rural part of the country.
 
I can't wait until these amateurs learn about photo-bleaching of luminophores. Once they figure out a solution for the moisture, they'll only have to figure out how to keep them out of the sunlight, then it will be good to go.
 
i think it's a good idea, but do think that something like waterproofness would have been tested in the lab.
Is there a better test condition than a small small part of the actual road it's going to be applied to. Although they may want to test on different kinds of roads throughout the country as roads get used by the weather and the people differently.
 
that reminds me of racing slot cars as a wee little lad (or when i was a kid) the slot car tracks had glow in the dark stickers that looked just like that. how trippy man.
 
Love all the monday morning quarterbacks. Heijmans is a billion dollar company, with over 8000 employees, yet everyone assumes that oh, they never tested it with water!!!

Some quotes from various searches:

"The current problem is that the light-absorbing stripes on provincial road N329 do not give off a consistent level of light across the 500m (0.3 mile) stretch. NOS reports this is due to the system's inability to deal with moisture, a problem that was anticipated when the experiment started."
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"Following extensive tests in the lab and on Heijmans’ external testing area, version 1.0 has now been applied to the N329. The object of the trial is to test Glowing Lines in ‘real life’ situations, so that further evolution of the lining to a version 2.0 can be enabled and accelerated."
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"The glowing road lines rely on crystals of strontium aluminate doped with europium or other materials, says Hans Goris, innovation manager at Heijmans. The crystals have been altered to extend their illumination time, he adds. ‘We are doing a demonstration project and we expect setbacks,’ Goris says. ‘This was the first experiment in a real life situation.’ The company is currently working on a fix and say it may take ‘a couple of weeks’.

The firm is also working on a road lining that can receive a tiny amount of power, via the integration of a power cord from a solar panel for example. Heijmans said in a statement that this ‘maintains the intensity and lighting duration of the lines irrespective of the weather and season, or the quantity of sunlight and the length of the day or night’.

Goris says that the strontium aluminate crystals are sealed in 40–100µm particles to protect them from water. ‘We have the crystals sealed in a package so the material is more stable. It is the way we reactivate them that gave us some problems with the water ingress in the electronics,’ he explains."
 
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