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Glowing Lines 1Glow-in-the-dark road markings coming to UK after Netherlands tests?
Bike lane markers that glow in the dark may be coming to the UK, if road authorities like the look of a test project in the Netherlands.
Road markings that charge during the day and glow at night have been installed on a section of the N329 near the town of Oss in the south.
The three-lined strips, dubbed Glowing Lines, use glow-in-the-dark paint treated with photo-luminizing powder that can emit light for up to 10 hours at night, reducing the need for lighting along the road.
It's the idea of designer Daan Roosegaarde and Heijmans Infrastructure, a Dutch multinational development company, who together cooked up the idea of 'Smart Highways' and launched the notion at the Dutch Design Week in 2012, reports .
Roosegaarde says travelling along a road with the Glowing Lines it as ‘going through a fairy tale’.
Here's a video that shows what they're like:
First Glowing Lines Smart Highway by Daan Roosegaarde from Studio Roosegaarde on Vimeo.
"The glowing lines are a little … Daft Punk look-alike but they are to do with safety," Roosegaarde told the BBC.
"The three lines merge into one and you feel that it guides you. With fog, you see them more than with standard light. There is much less energy used.
"There will be big projects, we have requests from China and India - these are places where you need safe roads that are disconnected from the energy grid."
The Glowing Lines technology could also be used to mark bike lanes. As a demonstration of that idea Roosegaarde and Heijmans are planning a glow-in-the-dark bike path.
Inspired by Vincent Van Gogh's masterpiece Starry Night, the 600m Van Gogh-Roosegaarde light emitting bicycle path will open on November 12, in Neunen where Van Gogh lived from 1883 to 1885.
It will use glowing stones rather than lines to create a starscape under riders' tyres.
We reported on an earlier glow-in-the-dark path project last year, in Cambridge.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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17 comments
If only she'd checked first with the Road.cc comments section experts, she wouldn't have wasted everyone's time with this crazy Dutch idea...
Great idea! This would also help on rural roads so that we can continue to ride at night during the winter! Perhaps they could also use the glowing stones to fill the pot holes.......!
What the article does not say is that when they were first trialled this on the N329, the luminescence stopped working after the paint got wet and they had to reformulate the paint.
If something as obvious as rain caused it failed then how close is this to being finished? Will it withstand traffic driving over it for instance?
What ever went wrong with catseyes? When I was younger I remember them being all over the place, but they seem very much out of fashion these days.
Seems to me like they'd do the same job as these fancy lines but last a lot longer and work for more than a couple of hours each night.
Getting decent infrastructure, never mind glow in the dark infrastructure, in this country is as likely to happen as any fairytale.
What if it snows? It does do that sometimes. In the winter mostly.
The same as happens for the usual sort of road markings which have the disadvantage of usually being snow coloured and not being able to glow in the dark either
And which also don't have the function of lighting up the road.
Is it just me or does anyone else worry that car drivers will see this as a bike-lane and give cyclists the 8 inches or so of space that the three glowing bands take up? Or am I looking too literally at the video, and a proper implementation would have the glowing lines further out into the road with glowing bicycle symbols and stuff? having said that I hate cycle lanes anyway because they encourage drivers to give you minimum space. They might be good for shared pedestrian/cycle infrastructure though.
Now that painting the edge of the road blue has made cycling safe in London, I guess turning off the streetlamps and painting glow-in-the-dark lines on the road will mean there are never any causalities again. Europe truly is the birth place of all great ideas.
This will look cool, but the light emitted will fade the closer to dawn it is. If combined with reflective devices it could be workable. But the most need would be in winter, where the daylight required to charge would be minimal.
The light emitted would only be able to guide and bike lights would still be needed.
But it would still look cool.
Not too much wrong with retroreflective latex paint, except it wears out, just like this.
I don't see much of that around, and it's a proven technology.
Well I think it's a great idea. Crack on.
Why?
Why are we constantly trying to build houses on sand when it comes to cycling infrastructure. The dutch can afford to mess around with these sorts of frivolities because they have (most) of the basics right and the budget to improve infrastructure that is already of a quality we can only dream of....
Step one is space that feels safe to cycle in, step twenty or thirty is messing about with nice glow in the dark paint....
Great - we should get them for Brixton Road (the A23) in S London as well, since Mr Van Gogh used to live round the corner.
not to knock what sounds interesting idea and does look good, but 10hours?
From October through march, from equinox to equinox, night time is over 12 hours, ok the hours of darkness aren't the same.
So what happens in the early hours just before dawn, the hours when IME fog is most likely?
Brilliant. Lets hope the £6.67 allocated to cycling development in this country will cover it. Obviously it won't be possible in the new forest as it will traumatize the ponies.
Great idea though, wonder what it costs? Hopefully something similar could be transferred to clothing as well.