Netherlands highways will glow in the dark from mid-2013

[Gimli]

A smart road design that features glow in the dark tarmac and illuminated weather indicators will be installed in the Netherlands from mid-2013.

"One day I was sitting in my car in the Netherlands, and I was amazed by these roads we spend millions on but no one seems to care what they look like and how they behave," the designer behind the concept, Daan Roosegaarde, told Wired.co.uk. "I started imagining this Route 66 of the future where technology jumps out of the computer screen and becomes part of us."

The Smart Highway by Studio Roosegaarde and infrastructure management group Heijmans won Best Future Concept at the Dutch Design Awards, and has already gone beyond pure concept. The studio has developed a photo-luminising powder that will replace road markings -- it charges up in sunlight, giving it up to ten hours of glow-in-the-dark time come nightfall. "It's like the glow in the dark paint you and I had when we were children," designer Roosegaarde explained, "but we teamed up with a paint manufacture and pushed the development. Now, it's almost radioactive".

Special paint will also be used to paint markers like snowflakes across the road's surface -- when temperatures fall to a certain point, these images will become visible, indicating that the surface will likely be slippery. Roosegaarde says this technology has been around for years, on things like baby food -- the studio has just upscaled it.

The first few hundred metres of glow in the dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Brabant in mid-2013, followed by priority induction lanes for electric vehicles, interactive lights that switch on as cars pass and wind-powered lights within the next five years.

The idea is to not only use more sustainable methods of illuminating major roads, thus making them safer and more efficient, but to rethink the design of highways at the same time as we continue to rethink vehicle design. As Studio Roosegaarde sees it, connected cars and internal navigation systems linked up to the traffic news represent just one half of our future road management systems -- roads need to fill their end of the bargain and become intelligent, useful drivers of information too.


Read more at http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/30/smart-highway-glows-in-the-dark

This looks awesome.

[SugarD]

That is incredible. Truly a great idea other countries should follow through with. Talk about job creation and driver safety. The only loss I see here is money being spent on it, but that can be easily regenerated and put back into the economy through the workers getting paid to re-paint the roads.

[Reece]

I must admit the displaying weather thing is pretty cool - but seems a somewhat pointless? For one, most drivers with common sense should be able to tell the weather simply by looking. But here, at least the matrix signs which are all over motorways and a lot of Dual Carriage A-Roads display information like this. And as for illuminating the road, cats eyes have been a thing for some 80 years.

[SugarD]

I must admit the displaying weather thing is pretty cool - but seems a somewhat pointless? For one, most drivers with common sense should be able to tell the weather simply by looking. But here, at least the matrix signs which are all over motorways and a lot of Dual Carriage A-Roads display information like this. And as for illuminating the road, cats eyes have been a thing for some 80 years.

Well not all weather conditions will be obvious right away. Situations, such as black ice, can't even be seen but can still cause you to crash easily.

[Mikal]

It's like those glow sticks just with paint..

[TheLegitHabibi]

This is niice

[Halt]

It's an interesting idea.
Sounds good to me!

[Ratko Gavrilovic]

Retarded, the government is making cuts everywhere, leaving people hungry and making things more expensive to save money, yet they invest in things like this.

[Arturo_Diaz]

Interesting idea..

[BKP]

While other countries get glowing highways, we still struggle to get some highways

[Wolfe]

Retarded, the government is making cuts everywhere, leaving people hungry and making things more expensive to save money, yet they invest in things like this.

Don't really see people having no money to eat, I mean sure there is, but I don't think the cuts are that big.

[Deka]

Nice roads 

[JDC]

Even if problems such as lack of food and highways exist in other parts of the world, advances have to be made somewhere. Keep in mind that these will become the standard in the future.

The development of the next generation should not be held back simply because of the inability to solve current problems. For all we know, one of the solutions might be among the next batch of breakthroughs.

[Mikal]

You know there is such thing as 'cats eyes' which are kind of like this, but in small blocks spaced apart, mainly on dangerous roads such as those in the British country side which have no lighting at all, kinda the same just with paint, and this paint this does look alot better still.

[JackWhite]

Retarded, the government is making cuts everywhere, leaving people hungry and making things more expensive to save money, yet they invest in things like this.

The people thats hungry should go work for their money.