Dutch Engineers Touting Glow-in-the-dark Highway

I like this idea of a glow-in-the-dark highway. It saves all kinds of things like money and lives.

So some Dutch engineers have come up with a scheme to make driving at night a whole lot easier, via a "smart highway." See, the outside lines on the highway glow by themselves, no high beams needed. I would say that you wouldn't need your headlights at all anymore, but I'm not sure the Dutch designers would agreed with that proposition, especially in the light of road safety and all. Still, it couldn't hurt to have more nighttime road lighting that doesn't come from another driver's high beams.

Another fun feature of the proposal is that it posits painted lines that could display snowflakes when the road is, well, snow-covered, or icicles when the road is icy. Now wouldn't that be useful information to have, if you hadn't figured it out already given the driving conditions.

But wait, there's more: The interior lines, dotted or otherwise, would recharge by soaking up sunlight. It's all part of a dynamic, user-friendly roadway that could even recharge using under-road coils powered by the very vehicles going by overhead. In the same energy-saving vein, the road "lighting" would switch to low-light mode when traffic ceases.

Tests are expected in the Netherlands next year. I'm hoping that we are en-light-ened soon.