Lit up roads on remote areas has always been a difficult and extremely costly programme but thanks to the Glowing Highway Concept, it’s now cheaper and easier to implement
A Dutch designer, Daan Roosegaarde first realised that there is a lot of energy produced by our wheels and unfortunately, we are wasting it and don’t even know it. So he came up with an idea of utilising this untapped energy and named it ‘Glowing Road’ which became a smaller part of a much bigger project, code name “Smart Highway,” in collaboration with civil engineering firm Heijmans.
Soon this concept became an award-winning one as it focused more on making our roads highly interactive, safer, environment friendly, especially in the countryside where street lighting is hard to come by.
The world first came to know about this brilliant idea couple of months ago in Noord-Brabant, Netherlands, where the glowing road concept was officially unveiled. It used a special paint developed by Roosegaarde’s partners; capable of absorbing light during the day and emitting light at night, making it glow like Christmas tree.
At the testing phase, a first 500 metre patch of glow-in-the-dark road has been officially unveiled, and by the looks of it, seems quite promising. But despite of immense efforts exerted on developing special paint for this project, the early hiccup in the pilot program came up when the paint turned sensitive to the moisture. The engineers at Heijmans declared it to be a temporary issue that will soon be taken care of in the improved “Glowing Lines 2.0” planned to roll out this summer.
As it is evident that we’ll be driving electric vehicles in the near future, so engineers are working on cost effective and efficient solutions to power them, one idea that popped up was “What If The Roads Get Solar Panels Fitted On.” And if it really does become a reality, wouldn’t it be nice to have the roads glow-in-the-dark.
