In a bid to cut down on the use of electricity and money, more rural parts of a country are usually not littered with street lights compared to metropolitan areas and busy highways. While that is one way to save costs, it could at the same time prove dangerous to drivers who only have their car lights to illuminate the dark roads. Hopefully these dark roads will be a thing of the past as an artist, Daan Roosegaarde, and a manager of a civil engineering firm in The Netherlands, Hans Goris, have thought up of a couple of ways to make the roads safer during the night when street lights may not be available.
One of the ways includes glow in the dark strips which are used to paint road markings and would “charge up” by absorbing sunlight during the day, and glow in the dark for up to 10 hours during the night. Another way would be to paint the roads with temperature-sensitive paint which would glow blue when the weather is too cold, thus informing drivers that the tarmac might have iced over and could be slippery, thus warning drivers to driver slower.
Another idea would be to take advantage of the wind generated from passing cars and use that to power small turbines with LEDs attached to them, thus providing light markings to cars driving past at night. We’re not sure if and when governments would take the ideas of both these men and make them a reality, although hopefully sooner rather than later. What do you guys think?