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Glow-In-The-Dark Smart Highways Coming To the Netherlands In 2013
An anonymous reader writes "The Netherlands is moving forward with plans to build 'smart' highways that can become more easily visible in the dark or communicate weather conditions to drivers. Work will begin as early as next year. '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 up-scaled it. The first few hundred meters 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.'"
It's often black ice that is invisible on the roads that causes slipping, rather than visibly obvious snow. That is probably what this targets. Snow is an obvious indicator that road is dangerous, and this paint fixes parts where you can't easily see that.
the game
What happens when a really dirty set of tires [..] network those highways [..] use the computer [..] smartphone ..
Relax, this is about Europe: most people there with cars actually already know how to drive them.
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
Our roads turn white to signal that it is snowing.
Here in The Netherlands winter doesn't automatically means snow or temperatures below zero. So you can't see that roads are slippery. More often than not it's just below zero. The problem starts if it drizzled during the night and you only have ground frost. Then you get black ice. Which you don't see. Of course, if you walk towards your car you might know roads are slippery, but that doesn't guarantee that all roads are (or aren't) slippery.