The Smart Highway Technology

To prevent an accidents on the highway, some countries implement various solutions to reduce the number of accidents. A smart-road design that features glow-in-the-dark tarmac and illuminated weather indicators will be installed in the Netherlands from mid-2013.

The Smart Highway. (Pictur from: http://www.wired.com/)

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 10 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 manufacturer and pushed the development. Now, it’s almost radioactive".

The Smart Highway. (Pictur from: http://www.wired.com/)

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 Smart Highway. (Pictur from: http://www.wired.com/)

The first few hundred metres 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.

The Smart Highway. (Pictur from: http://www.wired.com/)

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.

The Smart Highway. (Pictur from: http://www.wired.com/)

Designer of this road paint technology, Daan Roosegaarde said and hope the highways become more intelligent and useful for riders by providing useful information. With the road markings as this will also reduce the use of street lights which will surely make more efficient use of energy.

Paul Watters, head of roads policy at the AA, told the Telegraph: "We do know that most accidents happen in the dark. It’s also comforting for people, especially if they arrive back from somewhere in the night, when they have got a late train. There are also suggestions that it increases crime. So it may save money in terms of energy but then you have to look at the cost in terms of security, safety and accidents, it may actually be more.". *** [WIRED | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | PIKIRAN RAKYAT 22112012]

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