Hasta La Gadget!

If you tend to drive at night, you know that it can get dangerous on roads without lighting. That’s one of the reasons why some engineers in the Netherlands decided to make their highways glow in the dark.

It was first suggested by Studio Roosegard back in 2012, and it was conceived to make roads safer as well as cut down on the amount of electricity needed to maintain the lighting on long stretches of highway. To this end, the N329 highway in Oss now has a 500 meter-long (~1640 foot) stretch which has glow-in-the-dark road markings. To pull off the trick, a photoluminescent powder was integrated into the road marking paint, and the lines charge up from sunlight captured during the daytime.

I have one concern though – how long will this paint last? It’s a known fact that paint on roads needs to be reapplied every few years.

[via Wired]

When not being used for poorly thought-out political revenge, traffic jams are making the lives of commuters suck on a daily basis. But sometimes, bad traffic can get spectacularly bad—even worse than fake traffic study bad. In honor of those times, we’ve collected some of the worst traffic jams in history.

Read more…

Personally, I hate speed cameras, especially the new mobile ones that are hard to spot. Now, can you imagine drones flying all over the place and handing out speeding tickets if you go over the limit? That would be hell. Actually, these drones aren’t designed to issue tickets (yet), but to monitor the highways and save lives.

This flying drone was created by the Georgia Institute of Technology in order to assist human workers safeguard 4 million miles of US highways. Such drones could inspect bridges and roads, performing surveys of land using laser mapping. The drone could also alert officials to traffic jams or accidents. The CONECTech Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology thinks that drones would help humans doing this kind of work for the Department of Transportation.

[via TechNewsDaily]