Road markings in Ireland tend to be poor at the best of times. While markings mostly stand out well on clear, dry days, anyone who’s driven on a wet night in a dark corner of the country knows all too well that the yellow and white lines that are supposed to delineate the edges of the road and the lane can just disappear.
There are a number of reasons for this. They include simple wear and tear and a lack of upkeep – a particularly prevalent issue for more remote roads. Rain and reflections can also obscure lines, and the dazzle from oncoming headlights can temporarily overwhelm with their brightness.
Of course, road markings are reactive – both the painted lines and the “cat’s eye” studs simply reflect the lights of your own car. What, though, if that wasn’t the case? What if the lines actually glowed from within?
It’s not so far-fetched. In Ireland, a Dublin-based company called LuminousFlux is experimenting with road-marking paints that glow – like the lume of an expensive wristwatch – all night long.
The Irish Times spoke to Arafah Lawal, director and founder of LuminousFlux.
“I had been living in Australia and through a contact I came across the use of luminous road markings there. Back in 2018, the Australian authorities began using them on a trial basis and it seemed to work well. I felt that this type of product could be hugely useful in Ireland, because – as anyone knows – when you’re driving on national roads at night, there are no street lights. So we felt that this technology could be very helpful to Irish drivers.”
The real beauty of the concept of LuminousFlux paint is that it doesn’t require energy. Okay, sure, there’s an energy-input cost if you’re looking at its manufacture, transport and finally its application to the road, but once that has happened, there’s no need for wiring, no need for overhead gantries nor light fixtures. Just let daylight soak into the paint and it will glow once all around is dark.
For how long, though? As anyone with a watch knows, the glow from the luminous paint on the hands and numbers, initially bright, fades quickly.
According to Lawal, the LuminousFlux paint lasts all night long. “Essentially, it consumes energy during the day, just like a solar panel,” he said. “The material works in the same way as the lume of a watch, basically, but it’s technically a very different substance. It can shine at night for up to 14 hours.
“In the last few weeks, we’ve been able to complete a trial with Sligo County Council and the results were good. Everyone was very happy with it. There was a lot of positive feedback from the council, and hopefully now there will be a wider roll-out.”
In the Sligo test, the luminous paint was applied to markings at around 1pm, and darkness fell at around 6pm. According to Lawal, those few hours of daylight were enough for a whole night’s brightness.
Paul O’Rourke, a senior engineer with Sligo County Council, said it had been satisfied with the results of the trial, the first with a local authority in Ireland. Having identified O’Boyle Park as a suitable location because of its good pavement surface and lack of public lighting, the council found that LuminousFlux markings glowed for approximately eight hours. Apart from absorbing energy during the day without the need for direct sunlight, Lawal said vehicle lights also recharged the glow, lengthening the time it glows for.
“It is widely used in Australia and is deemed to be very beneficial on rural roadways without public lighting to highlight the road ahead,” he said. “The cost of the product and installation time is similar to current reflective road markings. The durability and lifespan is also similar.”
Donegal County Council has apparently also shown an interest, and LuminousFlux’s plan is now to start pushing for a wider roll-out.
The luminous paint comes either ready-mixed or in powder form which needs to be mixed into the usual “hot-paint” boilers used for road marking. The pre-mixed bags, each containing around 20kg, can cover approximately 26 to 30 metres of 100mm-wide line, depending on the road surface and other factors.
There’s an obvious question in terms of how much this would all cost.
While the integration of the luminous paint into regular road markings is simple enough from a technical point of view – you just mix the powder in a boiler like normal road paint and spray it on – there’s a clear cost implication.
While Sligo County Council’s Paul O’Rourke said the overall cost was similar to that for conventional reflective road markings, Lawal did not say exactly how much extra per metre LuminousFlux’s product costs over conventional road-marking materials.
“You can’t look at it like regular road paint,” he said. “Obviously the cost efficiency is a bit different, so you need to look at from a different perspective.
“You don’t need to run cables, you don’t need to dig trenches and disturb roots, you don’t need electricity to illuminate a junction or a road at night. When you look at the cost of having to make a street light and a pole, this is both more cost-friendly and eco-friendly. It’s unique.”
The coating should last for years at a minimum, assuming it’s being used on a busy road where cars are constantly driving on the markings. On quieter roads, or footpaths and cycle paths, 20 years should be the minimum.
Lawal says LuminousFlux is “trying to get as much attention as we can from the Government” and that Transport Infrastructure Ireland had shown some interest.
All of which is all well and good, but do such luminous markings merely look nice at night? Or do they provide an actual benefit in terms of road safety?
According to Lawal, in Australia, the luminous paint was applied to a particularly tricky corner, which drivers were piling into fast and blind at night, with predictable consequences. Apparently there were considerable improvements in the collision rate, quite simply because drivers could see, much earlier, which way the road was going.
However, the Australian experience has been mixed. The state of Victoria put down some trial road markings in 2022, but found that there was an insufficient benefit to road safety, and so didn’t roll the markings out to all roads.
Testing is continuing in the neighbouring state of New South Wales, which said late last year that it was going to put down glowing markings on a dangerous 3km stretch known as Bulli Pass.
Luminous road paint has also been trialled in the Netherlands but the Dutch government department that looks after roads was not impressed.
The markings were trialled on a stretch of the N329 road, about 100km south of Amsterdam. Lennart Wegewijs, from the Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat, told The Irish Times that the glow-in-the-dark materials used in the trial had too short an afterglow time, were not really “charged” by headlights and did not meet the rules on colour for road markings due to their greenish colour. After some time, normal side stripes were applied again.
Heijmans, the engineering company that had installed the glowing lines, said: “As expected, the ‘real life’ trial enables us to learn from the environment and users. We will use these insights to introduce an update to the Glowing Lines 2.0 version.
“In the meantime we have temporarily faded out the lining to prevent any confusing situations for road users. Glowing Lines version 2.0 will be ready for this summer. It will then be introduced on a larger scale in the Netherlands and abroad.”
One potential side benefit is to wildlife. Being able to illuminate the contours of a road without installing bright overhead lighting will mean much less encroachment into natural habitats, not to mention the absence of heavy equipment needed to dig cable trenches and install light fixtures.
There is also potential to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions, according to Apesa, the French technological centre devoted to “ecological transition solutions”, which carried out a life-cycle analysis of LuminousFlux’s product. Marking one kilometre of cycle track with the glowing paint has equivalent CO2 emissions of 324.11kg/CO2/eq, compared to 1,381.74 for solar-powered lighting, and 2,655.12 for cabled lighting.
While questions remain over the efficacy of such luminous road markings, the potential for road safety improvements. reduced emissions and environmental factors make further research worthwhile.
