Light-absorbing glow-in-the-dark road markings have replaced streetlights on a 500-m stretch of highway in the Netherlands.
Watch Concrete.TV’s video of glow in the dark concrete here.
Studio Roosegaarde promised us the design back in 2012, and after cutting through rather a lot of government red tape we can finally see the finished product.
“It looks like you are driving through a fairytale,” which pretty much sums up this extraordinary project. The design studio like to bring technology and design to the real world, with practical and beautiful results.
Part of that Roosegaarde’s vision included weather markings — snowdrops, for instance, would appear when the temperature reached a certain level. For now though, the 500-m stretch of the N329 highway in Oss features only the glow-in-the-dark road markings, created using a photo-luminescent powder integrated into the road paint, developed in conjunction with road construction company Heijmans.
Roosegaarde told Wired.co.uk Heijmans had managed to take its luminescence to the extreme — “it’s almost radioactive”, said Roosegaarde. You can get some sense of that in this embedded tweet, which appears to show three stripes of varying shades of radioactive green along both the highway’s edges.
By Liat Clark
Read the full article here: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-04/11/glow-in-the-dark-highway-launches
