Luminescent Roads May Brighten Up Your Future 

A Dutch company has come up with the bright idea of painting the lines in highways with luminescent paint that glows in the dark. The idea is that the roads will be so lit up that they'll be able to turn off most street lights, saving a massive amount of energy in the process. They painted one of the highways as an experiment and it worked great. 

A fellow in the Netherlands by the name of Daan Roosegaarde said he came up with the idea while he was sitting in his car one day and realized that millions are spent on roads, but no one seems to care how they look or act. Then, while speaking to the BBC last year, Roosegaarde noted that the government is shutting down streetlights late at night in order to conserve energy and save money.

Roosegaarde felt it was strange that we spend billions of dollars on designing and developing cars, but the things on which they’re used aren't involved in that budget or process. So, his company — Studio Roosegaarde — teamed up with Heijmans, a Dutch civil engineering firm, to create a paint that can glow brightly enough in the dark — and under outdoor conditions — in order to light the way for drivers.

The team developed a photo-luminescent powder that, when mixed with road paint, can glow in the dark for up to 10 hours after charging up from the daytime sunlight. The paint was placed on a 0.3-mile stretch of highway N329, about 62 miles southeast of Amsterdam in the city of Oss. Studio Roosegaarde also aimed to add glowing weather symbols that would activate when the symbol’s corresponding weather conditions took place; for example, snowflake glyphs would appear on the road to indicate that the road is slippery and caution is advised. However, for now, only the glowing street lines have been implemented.

But now the pilot project has run into a serious stumbling block: the roads go dark when they get too wet. More specifically, moisture, such as that encountered during rainfall, can quickly reduce the effectiveness of the glowing paint’s light output—the pilot road markings were just put in place two weeks ago, reports the BBC, and yet already they’re dimming due to large amounts of rain. 

There is also another potential pitfall to the glowing lane markers: drivers seem to have great delight being able to cruise down the road in the test area with their headlights off, just so that they can see the glowing lines. This is, of course, a clear safety hazard, especially if such roads should become widespread. 

Nevertheless, Heijmans and artist Roosegaarde say a new version of the glowing road markings is already in development, and will be ready later this summer. Presuming the second iteration of the glow-in-the-dark roads works as expected, a wider roll-out is planned, both within the Netherlands and in other countries.