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Futuristic Highway Will Glow In the Dark For Icy Conditions
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Will Oremus reports that a glow-in-the-dark highway will be installed in the Netherlands that will replace standard road markings with photoluminescent powder that charges in the daylight and glows through the night for up to 10 hours. But the new highway's most interesting feature is when the temperature drops below freezing, the road will automatically light up with snowflake indicators to warn drivers of icy conditions (video). '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,' says designer Daan Roosegaarde. 'I started imagining this Route 66 of the future where technology jumps out of the computer screen and becomes part of us.' The first few hundred meters of glow-in-the-dark, weather-indicating road will be installed in the province of Branbant 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. 'Research on smart transportation systems and smart roads has existed for over 30 years — call any transportation and infrastructure specialist and you'll find out yourself,' adds Emina Sendijarevick. 'What's lacking is the implementation of those innovations and making those innovations intuitive and valuable to the end-consumers — drivers.'"
I had gloves that did that back in the 1970's.
Glad to finally see a more practical use for this 50 year old technology.
How is this going to be more visible than the highly reflective paint that is already used?
Many cars already notify you if icy conditions are likely to exist, snowflakes seem redundant.
Neither will be very visible when covered with snow and ice.
Or my car could sense tire traction, temperature and a few other sensor conditions to tell me this on the
big display. Oh wait, it does that now!
You're absolutely useless, aren't you Slashdot?
.com and the first is .co.uk. They were even published on the same day.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/10/30/2055259/glow-in-the-dark-smart-highways-coming-to-the-netherlands-in-2013
You even link to articles on the same site, just one is
That day being October 30th. Over 2 months ago. I think that would be considered "old" by any standard.
How much will it cost? How long will it last? Can you see the difference with your headlights on?
I'm not trying to insert a discussion of the pros and cons of the government making and maintaining roads, but simply trying to state that governments have very little, if any, incentive to improve roads, improve the safety of roads or use new innovative techniques. It usually takes a crisis before new things get implemented. Under normal circumstances they have very little incentive to continually raise the bar and wow the user (all of us) of the roads.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
In the U.S. state of Virginia, Interstate 64 runs east–west through the middle of the state from West Virginia to the Hampton Roads region, a total of 298 miles (480 km). It is notable for crossing the mouth of the harbor of Hampton Roads on the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, the first bridge-tunnel to incorporate man-made islands. Also noteworthy is a section through Rockfish Gap, a wind gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which was equipped with an innovative system of airport-style runway lighting embedded into the pavement to aid motorists during periods of poor visibility due to fog or other conditions.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_64_in_Virginia
A lighting system within the pavement to help designate lanes automatically activated by fog sensors was installed by the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to improve safety during such weather conditions.
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockfish_Gap
your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through
The snowflake part is stupid. I can tell when it's below freezing out. But lines that glow? Awesome. Ever driven a Ford Ranger? I have a better headlight on my bicycle.
Guys, I am disappoint .I know you can do better. I've seen articles that are years old posted as news on Slashdot over the years
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/30/smart-highway-glows-in-the-dark
What happens to a wind powered system when the wind goes to doldrums? How about multipower systems. You know, battery, solar, fossil fuel, coal, all working together to energize the future. Putting all your eggs in one basket leads to failure. Eventually, the sky will be cloudy, the wind will die for a week, and the storm will knock down the power lines. And the poor will have to pay thru the nose for your product.
... but wouldn't honking great images of snowflakes on the ground rushing towards you (and then underneath your car) not be rather distracting?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I have a great ice indicator at home; They're called eyes. If I have to defrost my car in the morning, the roads could be icy. If there was recently slow or heavy rain, the roads could be very icy. In both conditions, I will drive slower and in a higher gear than normal, will use the brakes very sparingly and start decelerating earlier, and will leave a much longer gap between my car and the car in front.
Queue cries of "The ice indicator didn't show that there was ice on the road, so I did 60MPH around that blind bend. I'm not liable!" and a hefty hike in insurance premiums.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This highway is "Cold Certified"
What potential health impacts?
This is not ionizing, nor are you going to generate a lethal current in a human body. Go away nutter.
Unfortunately... if they had this feature in the US on any roadway... instantly, I could see people crashing their cars... and suing the state because they "couldn't see the snow flakes." :-|
It looks like all that has been approved is a short experimental section. If the paint has not been proven to be able to hold up under real conditions I doubt very much that anyone would approve a full scale implementation on all roads. How do the markings hold up to wear, salt, plows, etc? It appears that this testing is what is approved.
It would also seem that one would get many false positives. From the article the markings glow when the roads are cold. Slippery roads are not necessarily caused by cold alone. It needs to be cold and wet or humid to get slippery conditions. Cold and dry conditions do not cause slippery roads. Another point is that if the temperature is always below the threshold the road will always glow and people will ignore it.
1. The wind powered lights will require power lines for backup for when the wind isn't enough. You could add batteries into the mix but you will have still need the power lines and then have to maintain the batteries.
2. The glow in the dark road markings will wear off. Is the safe for the eviroment?
3.The glow in the dark road markings will be more expensive than the paint we use now. BTW current paint reflect a lot of light. Since cars have lights why make the roads markings glow?
4. Inductive charging roads? How much copper will that take?
All that money would be better spent on making sure all roads have reflective markings and maybe an AM radio based system of road condition warnings, digital data of course.
I have become convinced people come up with engineering scams. You come up with some really cool sounding or looking idea that has a lot of issues and extremely high costs. You then make nice presentations, you then get people saying, "this is cool", and then you get money to study the "problems" and build nothing or a small useless test system. Kind of like a cool picture of a bridge that had windmills under the roadway. It would have been expensive, a bad bridge, and a bad windmill.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Let's look at this simply. New system in road = new system cost * miles of road. Paid by government. Smarter cars and driver education work regardless of whether the road is smart and the cost (and as mentioned above the liability) rest on the car owner not the government.
Silence is a state of mime.
The province of "Branbant" does not exist.
It's called "Noord Brabant" (note the lack of 'n').
I so miss seeing stars...
I live in Wisconsin. We have a nickname for anyone whose car goes in the ditch on the highway during a big snowstorm: morons. It's always some piece of crap minivan or Saturn Ion or Pontiac of some sort. The driver is always in a hurry or forgot that 4 wheel drive doesn't do anything for stopping and tada, ditch. Last major snowstorm there was approx 1 car in the ditch every 1.5 miles. No amount of sparkly snowflakes on the road will keep people that stupid from driving that stupidly, trust me. They're just idiots who will never learn their lesson. They're all Wisconsin plates too so don't go thinking it's someone from Texas or something who's never seen snow because those people are smart enough to stay home.
This idea would be a giant waste of time and money and not benefit anyone.
It is the mechanical engineers who have fallen so short of their assigned task. The other things they talked about constantly, video-phone and TV that hangs like a picture on the wall have been delivered by the electronic engineers. Even the hand held communicator that will put all the knowledge of the human race at the finger tips have been delivered. Though it is a big let down to realize that a huge percentage of knowledge of human race consists of cat videos and spoofed sub-titles of the Hitler movie.
Come on, Mech engineers. Step up to the plate. I am putting "Violate the Second law of thermodynamics" on the Kanban board. Deliverable as a beta feature for the preview release this quarter. And quantum mechanics. You are next. When are we getting the worm-hole to Andremeda? You guys keep going in circles. Just like your particles in that superconducting super-collider ring.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
My car has this rather advanced system. Once it becomes dark outside, I simply pull a little knob on the dashboard and an integral lighting system is activated, illuminating the road, pedestrians and other obstacles ahead of me.
Have gnu, will travel.
A lot of posters obviously didn't read the article, so here we go.
They are using a paint that absorbs light in the daytime and releases it in the nighttime. 25 years ago I had some glow in the dark toys that worked on the same principle. It's not magick, nor a violation of thermodynamics. This can be reapplied when they would be repainting the lines, anyways.
The wind-powered lights use the wind of passing automobiles to light up.
Not sure how the temperature ones work, but again, we've had toy cars that changed colour by temperature for years.
the road will automatically light up with snowflake indicators to warn drivers of icy conditions (computer-generated video)
FTFY.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Well, the problem is that on average, it's dark for about 12 hours. And in the season when it becomes cold enough for it to trigger, it's dark even longer.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I get what he's saying but that phrase isn't really apt since Route 66 was replaced by the modern Interstate 40 decades ago. Ironically there are sections of Route 66 that are impassable by most vehicles when it snows due to steep hill grades (in Oklahoma at least where I lived off it years ago).
that will do a lot of good when the road is covered in hard-pack snow (non northerners think ice but opaque white)
will repair costs and repair time go up to fix the roads when pot holes show up? Don't get me wrong I think it's a neat idea but the cost of up keep is the question. And will the road workers have to have a graphic designer on staff to draw the snowflakes correctly?
I proposed this technology way back in 3rd grade in response to an assignment about saving energy. Note that the year was 1973. I expect royalty checks.
Self awareness - try it!
Drivers paying £1.30+ a litre fuel and £200+ tax discs to make up for Google, Amazon and Starbucks tax evasion so no money left for innovation on government.
Another way to pander to idiot drivers, teaching them nothing except that they don't need to be observant or thoughtful drivers.
Back up cameras, back up sensors, blind-spot detectors, cruise control all help to create a less aware driver. Now they'll learn that they don't need to pay attention to the road condition. (Slippery slope argument? Maybe)
I almost ran over my 2 year old nephew one time in my truck (Dodge Ram). I didn't see him, he was behind me where there is NO visibility, sure a back up camera or sensor would have worked, but instead he has a responsible mother who saw and came out screaming and waving her hands to get me to stop (I drive an older diesel so it's a bit noisy). That's all it takes, responsibility. So there goes anyone's "what-if" argument; yes, it did happen to me.
Pay attention to what's around you, if you can't, have others do it. Turn your head to look in your blind spot. Lean to maintain your own steady speed. Learn to identify road conditions, and be able to control your vehicle if it slides that the speed you are going. If you can't control that slide, slow down to a speed that you can control the slide; then, if you do slide, you're OK.
Why do we keep pandering to mediocrity?
Now of course, this is all in general, I'm sure there's some with disabilities that don't allow them to turn their head properly, or maintain even pressure with their foot and whathaveyou.
Round here they solved the problem by making the surface of the road rough enough so that even when its icy you still get some traction.
The best thing is it doesn't cost anything, you just don't resurface the road during the road construction season.
And the rough roads encourage slower driving all year round.
I regularly drive on I-70 over the mountains, usually in the dark. Lane markings is pretty much the only way to navigate. There's just not enough light (w/o high beams) to see the upcoming turns. When lane markings are worn out or invisible due to slush or wet road it's next to impossible to drive.
Another hazard is the ice on overpasses and bridges, which ice up before the rest of the road. Yet another is the first appearance of icy road as you gain altitude going up a mountain passes. Some sort of indication of ice on the road would have been super helpful.
I am not exactly sure how much snow they get or how it matches up to snow in Canada/Alaska/Northern US but at least up here in Alaska the plows tend to scrape off the paint as they go about their routes, causing us to need to repaint our roads quite often. Depending on the cost difference between traditional paint and this new stuff this could either be a great idea or massively expensive to upkeep.
"interactive lights that switch on as cars pass"
The wild life crossing the road would suddenly become blind and wouldn't be able to get out of the way when hearing a car approaching. Don't think small critters, think deers or bigger. You really don't want to crash into one of these.
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Better visibility will be featured in new highway designs. As day dims into night, electric eyes automatically illuminate the road ahead.
The 1958 video doesn't show anything I would call an "electric eye," but the highway appears to glow in the dark. We have had "electric eyes" on streetlights for a while, with sensors that turn the lights on when it gets dark, but it always stuck with me that they didn't show any street lights in the video... the road itself seemed to be the light source.
This is a neat idea but maybe overkill. It amazes me how much easier it is to drive when the painted lines and reflectors are maintained on a road (especially on a dark night when it is raining). I would be willing to bet that allowing the painted lines to wear away and not replacing the reflectors causes a LOT of traffic accidents (and fatalities). I don't think we have to go crazy with the markings, just install them and maintain them properly. I now travel roads that lack reflectors (they have broken off and haven't been replaced) and lack proper painted lines (worn off) that I now consider dangerous.
Let's see, glare from the ice blinding you and everyone else, can't see the lanes, oh, that's right: all of this needs power... and when the power's out, it's useless. Let's see, when does power go out... oh, right, in bad weather!
reflectors in the road, in the lines, as they have in some states, are a far better and cheaper solution, and they're "powered" by your headlights (unless you're one of those idiots with misaligned headlights, in states that don't have a safety inspection which includes that, every year).
mark
An outside thermometer in a car says nothing about the temperature of the road. Just because the road isn't slick where you are currently driving does not mean there is not a slick patch in the bend on the bridge ahead. The temperature of any given spot on the road will change base on the geography beneath it. The snow flakes are a very good idea. Once the surface temperature drops bellow freezing, ice is possible, and likely.
And what are they going to do for the remaining 6 hours of the night during winter?
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
you are on a glow I dark, ice warning, lots of warning for bends road and get used to it; then you hit one without expecting then to be there.
That's clearly not the Netherlands. See all the mountains in the background?
ZOAB wiki article (in Dutch).
I didn't know it was so innovative. It's very good if it rains a lot in your country, or if the large roads are close to lived-in areas (like in the Netherlands). But it's not a panacea and it wears down more quickly than concrete road.
I'd just prefer a system which detects when the wheels are slipping, and then immediately sprays a traction agent onto the tire treads.
So it would work similar to anti-lock brakes or stability control.
The added benefit is that the traction agent would then also be smeared onto the road at the spot where the slipperiness was, so that other vehicles later passing over the same spot would also benefit, even if they didn't have the same active traction system onboard.
http://solarroadways.com/intro.shtml ... ...
"Suppose we made a section of road out of this material and housed solar cells to collect energy, which could pay for the cost of the panel, thereby creating a road that would pay for itself over time. What if we added LEDs to "paint" the road lines from beneath, lighting up the road for safer night time driving? What if we added a heating element in the surface (like the defrosting wire in the rear window of our cars) to prevent snow/ice accumulation in northern climates? The ideas and possibilities just continued to roll in and the Solar Roadway project was born.
In 2009, we received a contract from the Federal Highway Administration to build the first ever Solar Road Panel prototype. During the course of its construction, we learned many lessons and discovered new and better ways to approach this project. These methods and discoveries are discussed throughout this website. Please enjoy and send us any questions that you may have.
The Solar Roadway is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels that collect energy to be used by our homes and businesses. Our ultimate goal is to be able to store excess energy in or alongside the Solar Roadways. This renewable energy replaces the need for the current fossil fuels used for the generation of electricity. This, in turn, cuts greenhouse gases literally in half....
Each individual panel consists of three basic layers:
Road Surface Layer - translucent and high-strength, it is rough enough to provide great traction, yet still passes sunlight through to the solar collector cells embedded within, along with LEDs and a heating element. It is capable of handling today's heaviest loads under the worst of conditions. Weatherproof, it protects the electronics layer beneath it.
Electronics Layer - Contains a microprocessor board with support circuitry for sensing loads on the surface and controlling a heating element. No more snow/ice removal and no more school/business closings due to inclement weather. The on-board microprocessor controls lighting, communications, monitoring, etc. With a communications device every 12 feet, the Solar Roadway is an intelligent highway system.
Base Plate Layer - While the electronics layer collects energy from the sun, it is the base plate layer that distributes power (collected from the electronics layer) and data signals (phone, TV, internet, etc.) "downline" to all homes and businesses connected to the Solar Roadway. Weatherproof, it protects the electronics layer above it.
When multiple Solar Road Panels are interconnected, the intelligent Solar Roadway is formed. These panels replace current driveways, parking lots, and all road systems, be they interstate highways, state routes, downtown streets, residential streets, or even plain dirt or gravel country roads. Panels can also be used in amusement parks, raceways, bike paths, parking garage rooftops, remote military locations, etc. Any home or business connected to the Solar Roadway (via a Solar Road Panel driveway or parking lot) receives the power and data signals that the Solar Roadway provides. The Solar Roadway becomes an intelligent, self-healing, decentralized (secure) power grid. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.