When you drive at night and your headlights illuminate a lane marking, it makes you feel safer, right? After all, bright pavement markings are designed to help you stay in your lane and prevent you from running off the roadway.
Called retroreflectivity, special materials in edge lines and lane lines create the brightness. With age and wear that brightness deteriorates. Although we assume there’s a correlation between pavement marking retroreflectivity and safety, up until now researchers have not been able to prove it.
“It’s a hard thing to measure,” says Paul Carlson, Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) Research Engineer, who is also the head of the Institute’s Operations and Design Division. Carlson is known for his pavement marking research and leads TTI’s unique Visibility Research Laboratory. Read More