Glow-in-the-dark roads make debut in Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Glow-in-the-dark roads make debut in Netherlands

wired.co.uk

95 pointsprotomyth46 comments

Going to have to be cynical about this. What problem does this solve? Cats-eyes[1] do a very good job the world over at the moment.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_eye_%28road%29

edit: Now I think about it, that Wikipedia article makes it sound like Cats-eyes are mainly a UK thing. People in other countries - do you not have these?

Yes, we have retroreflective road marking elements (meaning elements that try to send light directly back to the source) but they sometimes take a little different form.

Specifically, in California, we have plastic ones closely resembling the picture you linked, which are tarred to the road surface, but they have a corner cube molded plastic retroreflective element (like a bicycle reflector) instead of a spherical glass element. However, some signs still feature large diameter glass beads: http://www.aaroads.com/shields/show.php?image=CA19580103

Also, the road paint itself contains high-index glass spheroids that retroreflect headlights back into the driver's eyes, making the paint glow brighter than it would normally. Cat's eyes everywhere!

Actual cat eyes are also retroreflective due to the tapetum lucidum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapetum_lucidum

Cat's eyes don't work with snow plows.

Wikipedia says different:

"Cat's eyes are particularly valuable in fog and are largely resistant to damage from snow ploughs."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_eye_(road)

As does the Reflecting Roadstud's manufacturer's website:

"The final component part of the “Catseye” is the cast iron base. Manufactured from Grey Iron, the cast iron base affords excellent protection to the rubber insert and has been specifically designed to withstand the demands of heavy traffic and effects of snow-ploughing."

http://www.percyshawcatseyes.com/products/the-cats-eyes-road...

The cat's eye will lift the plow off the ground and at that point the plow won't be doing its job. Not much snow in the UK.

Catseyes are a menace for bicycles so this would be great in urban areas, and especially dedicated bike tracks, eliminating the need for lighting.

We don't have them in Canada because they prevent us from using snow plows on the road.

In my part of Canada we do. Or maybe I should say did... until the snow plows got them.

I live in Prince Edward Island and they were put in in some especially tricky areas just last summer and already they are mostly gone. They were the type where they cut a little dip in the road and install them so that they are even with the height of the pavement and that didn't even save them.

The glow in the dark paint on the other hand would be a huge improvement and not susceptible to damage. Not to mention no installation required.

Interesting.

The Gorge in OR has the sunken markers and I've yet to see one show up missing during the snow season.

Wonder if there is specific method to install and also for applying the snow plow to cause the reflectors to stay in place.

I don't know about the whole of PEI - I only lived in the Summerside area for a little over a year, or two winters' worth, before the Canadian Forces Base closure was announced - but in my experience snow was not anything like occasional (or vertical, for that matter; precipitation is a horizontal phenomenon) and ground stability is an old civil engineer's wife's tale. The island is essentially a waterlogged sandbar with a plastic surface that almost seems alive during the frost season. Shallow roadbeds ripple with the seasons; deep concrete slabs tend to shift significantly. (The slab-bed highway around Charlottetown looked like a post-earthquake scene in the spring of '89, and a brisk business was being done in tires, wheels and steering and suspension parts.) There isn't a lot that works well "everywhere" that's directly transferable to PEI. The only way to make sure that inset features stay inset is to sink them deep enough to be more or less useless.

In AZ, CA and OR (only states I know for sure) in the snowy areas, reflective markers are placed in a divot removed from the area between the painted lane markings. It works and is not very noticeable when changing lanes.

As soon as you get to the areas where snow is minimal, the divots stop.

I've not noticed other states (WY, CO, NE, KS) doing this.

They're present on some BC roads, where it doesn't snow as much.

I drive a lot at night on I-70 between Denver and Green River. Visibility of the road is a big issue in the areas of tight curves. When I used to have an older car with weaker headlights having to step on brakes abruptly for not being able to tell which way the road ahead curves used to happen periodically.

Over the mountain passes in spring where the lane markings get worn down sometimes you just can't see anything w/o high beams (and risking to blind the oncoming traffic).

We have them in Texas but I've never heard them called that. Growing up we just called them "city titties" but I doubt that is the technical term.

Glowing lines will show even where your headlights are not shining. Curves and intersecting streets come to mind. Even gaps in the line for a driveway would be apparent.

We have some reflectors, but the cost of installing snowplow survivable ones is high enough that they are not justified according to our highway department. (Missouri, USA, 38°N)

If the glow doesn't add too much to the cost of the paint, it could be a winner.

Yes, Florida (which gets massive amounts of rain) has them absolutely everywhere, from regular roads and avenues, to highways and turnpikes. They're the plastic version, not the metal snow plow survivable version. There's almost never snow down there anyway. Driving at night is amazing. The downside is that the roads are so nice people get a little too comfortable and relaxed when driving. So there's massive amounts of accidents and pedestrian hits and fatalities.

how about these: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Leitpfos...

also road paint is mixed with glass fragments and is highly reflective. ok, it does not glow at night by itself, but your car should have lights ;)

Most roads in the Netherlands have simple red or white reflectors every 50 meters or so alongside both roadsides, and/or in corners. Some areas have cat eyes, but that's very area-specific, not a national standard. Most roads have just white markings, which are only really visible when there's headlights on them - they become very hard to see when it's raining though. I don't know if these would solve that latter problem either.

It sounds like a UK thing because the inventor was Percy Shaw from Halifax in the UK. I went to school with his grand-daughter or something like that. Same as traffic lights were first used in the UK

These pictures are just 3D renderings, right? Are there any real pictures, or better yet video, of what the road looks like?

I tried playing the video [1] on the Dutch news site, but it seems stuck on the first frame.

[1] - http://nos.nl/audio/634119-het-lijkt-alsof-je-door-een-sproo...

That's because there is no video. It's a sound fragment to which they added a single photo (not a render) to make it a video (why? no idea).

It's an excerpt from a radio show.

I think the tweet they linked is real: https://twitter.com/MaximeVerhagen/status/454342628822495233

This article has a video: http://nos.nl/video/634091-eerste-autoweg-met-glowing-lines....

What a great idea!

If they are already going to repaint all the lines, I would want something added to them that is electromagnetically visible too in order to help the autonomous cars be able to see the lines. I freely admit that tracking the other vehicles is by far the harder problem but it seems like the more digitally hospitable the environment is the more computing power can be used for the hard problems.

The problem with road paint is that it's exposed to the sun, elements, salt, freeze/thaw cycles, abrasion, etc. Maybe they are using the cheap stuff where I live because what they tend to do is repaint in the summer and it's pretty much gone by the following spring. Making the road paint more expensive with glow-in-the-dark additives would not seem to help the problem of the paint being worn away entirely because it costs too much to repaint often enough.

Road paint varies across the world. Where I live it appears to be a fairly thick layer of coloured goo applied hot that hardens almost immediately. It tends to last at least as long as the road surface itself.

In the HN guidelines:

> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

The first line of this article refers to its original publication in Wired:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-04/11/glow-in-the-d...

Thank you. I changed it.

BTW, speaking of unintended consequences: I just love how on some interstates they put up bright orange lights right near an exit and a tight curve afterwards.

So, you are doing 84mph (speed limit being 75) and go from relatively bright lit area into a dark and a curve. A second of blindness inevitably follows.

Still, I would probably rather just have a higher divider between lanes in different directions, so that high beams can be just used most of the time.

Having travelled much of Australia recently I'm aware of how many animals (especially kangaroos down here) are killed at night by standing on the road and not reacting in time to oncoming car headlights.

Wondering of there is any way this could help detract animals from standing on the road.

I've been playing with other ideas to deter them from being on the road, maybe playing with the smell or edging of the road but would love more ideas.

Can't see any deterrent being feasible as what might deter a kangaroo would not necessarily work for slower animals like koalas, wombats or echidnas that have little chance evading a car.

What does help is having an elevated road surface with occasional tunnels to allow animals to cross under.

Not to nitpick, but wombats can actually run pretty fast when they want to - up to 40kph. And I reckon kangaroos, while fast, aren't very manoeuvrable; if they're on a line they tend to stay on that line, right into the path of the vehicle.

Koalas, though, geeze - they're slow, drunk usually, and don't give a damn. I almost hit one once, slamming on the brakes and almost going off the road, and the damn thing didn't react at all, just kept unconcernedly strolling across. Doubt anything can stop them except fences combined with safe crossings (tunnels, wildlife bridges).

Probably makes a wombat even more problematic if they decide to run back across the road. Just make sure the fence has a decent concrete footer - they're pretty unstoppable.

It's one thing to replace cat-eyes with this, it's something else to replace street lighting with this, as the article mentions. I want to see everything on the road, not just the lane markings. Even when other cars have their lights on, we see then better when the road is lit up.

There are many stretches of road in the Netherlands which are not fitted with lighing at all, mostly sparsly inhabited parts of the country. I've ridden a motorcycle with a less than powerfull headlight on those roads, would've loved this to exist then!

If you take a look at the video you will notice it doesn't work. The white lines are much brighter than the glow in the dark lines.

This is only an improvement when you are driving without lights (which is illegal).

What if it's not sunny the day before? The glow in the dark paint won't have a chance to recharge.

This was on the Dutch news a few days ago. They mentioned there'a apparently a way to manually charge the paint as well. No details.

There would also be regular lights as I understand, just that those lights would be turned off when the lines can glow brightly enough.

Apparently it can also be directly charged electrically. And they claim it doesn't need much sun to recharge.

How is it that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7583627 is also on the front page and above this?

Looks like this was originally a blog post and was later changed to the wired article. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7583306

I just hope cost of paint is less then the cost of road

how can an article about glow in the dark roads not have real pictures of glow in the dark roads? (sadface)

Another excellent application for the elderly!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com