Highways Of The Future
Many cities can’t afford to update their roads that people drive on daily. Driving — even with lights — becomes a test to stay in your lane and devolves into a safety hazard when weather erases the lines you depend on when driving at night. Daan Roosegaarde, a Dutch designer, aims the change that and make roads glow like airplane runways, but his ambitions don’t stop there.
Roosegaarde looks to change the way we drive on the road completely. He and his team of Dutch designers want to have roads that charge your electric vehicle as you drive, communicate with drivers and warn drivers of ice conditions with color changing paint.
“The road industry is one of the most conservative industries out there,” Roosegaarde tells WIRED. “But I love them because they determine what a city looks like much more than the cars do. In a weird way, nobody cares about them. I think that should change.”
Roosegaarde has been developing his ideas on changing the way we view the road since 2012. He has worked with Dutch company Heijmans to come up with his vision of making roads safer with a new glow-in-the-dark paint material with a luminescent powder to absorb solar energy.
“It’s more advanced than the glow-in-the-dark paint you and I know, which only works for 30 minutes—completely useless,” he says. “Even though it’s rainy most of the time in the Netherlands, It’s still good enough.”
With something that could change so much of what we’re used to on the road, it needs testing. Near the city of Afsluitdijk, the Dutch prime minister of infrastructure wants to test Roosegaarde’s idea on a 20 mile stretch of road. Others around the world are eager to get the paint, as well. Tokyo wants it for their roads for the Olympics in 2020, and people from Qatar are even asking, “How much for 1,000 kilometers?” Roosegaarde said.
Every idea that is proposed that seems too fantastic to work is given pause, but this one seems immediately worthwhile. It hasn’t even been fully tested yet and the idea of it has people all over the world throwing their checkbooks at it. One day, hopefully, we will have glowing roads that make us safer drivers sooner.
As of this posting, Roosegaarde and Heijmans will be launching their glowing bike path in the Netherlands.
The 12th of November Roosegaarde and Heijmans will launch the next Smart Highway project, the first unique Van Gogh-Roosegaarde light emitting bicycle path. This cultural spinoff is inspired by Van Gogh’s masterpiece ‘Starry Night’, and gives cyclists the opportunity to experience a modern version of this painting in an innovative landscape of light. The path is part of the historic Van Gogh route in Nuenen, the Netherlands. (Via)
First a bike path, then the world!
FOLLOW JEFF SORENSEN ON TWITTER
Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.