Torque Talk: Road marking nightmares

Imagine you are driving home at night. It’s wet, cold and the street lights are providing agreeable levels of illumination as you navigate traffic on your way to a rendezvous with a warm fire or glass of port at the end of a long day. Ben Selby reports.

This undertaking would be safer if you were able to clearly see what lane you were in. In these conditions, the painted lines used to separate your side of the road from the cycle lane, bus lane or oncoming traffic are often difficult to see when coupled with heavy rain and streetlights. The same can be said for some sections of rural road where you might have next to no illumination other than your headlights.

A clear solution would be to use luminous paint. Australia has already trialled this in the outback in an effort to bring down the road toll. These road markings absorb natural light from the sun during the day and emit this light after dark, giving you roads which quite literally “glow in the dark.” Surely this could work over here? It would certainly make it far easier for us to read the road in low light or hazardous driving conditions.