Design Essay: Are smart roads just around the corner?

In order to remain relevant, the car must constantly evolve. But while almost all attention focuses on four wheels, the roads that facilitate an automobile's progress have remained relatively unaltered since Eisenhower formed the National Highway system in the 1950s.

With environmental concerns getting ever higher on the agenda, there is an opportunity to think outside the (metal) box and rethink the road, making it as smart as the vehicles and devices that travel upon it.

What's more, a smarter road can support and even enhance the motoring experience a smarter car may provide, creating potential for mutually beneficial advances – much like one of Syd Mead's visions of a future road network where autonomous cars that are essentially 'sentient, super-evolved versions of the horse' drive on hi-tech, high density roads in 'electronic herds'.

In 2012, Studio Roosegaard, headed by Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, presented The Smart Highway. Designed in conjunction with infrastructure firm Heijmans, it launched in prototype form at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven the same year.

The design featured a host of enhancements to the existing road network using, for the most part at least, existing affordable technologies. The prototype showed enough potential for a deeper agreement to be forged between the two stakeholders in 2014. Over the next three years, they plan to make around 10 Smart Highway ideas a reality, taking the first welcome steps to make roads smarter.

The first is relatively simple. Called Glowing Lines, it uses photo-sensitive paint to replace the conventional markings on the street. By day, the paint absorbs UV light, which is then emitted as a green glow for eight hours during the night, removing or reducing the need for street lights.

A real-world test took place from 10 April on a 500-meter section of the N329 near Oss, around 100km from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Encouragingly, but not unexpectedly, Heijmans claimed that the public's reaction was positive, but there were issues, namely the paint wasn't consistently visible when the road was wet, so the lines have been removed.

However, an upgraded 'Glowing Lines version 2.0' will be ready for this summer, and the next trial will take place on a larger scale in the Netherlands and abroad.

The next step is Dynamic Paint, which uses a different formula that is applied to the road surface in the shape of oversized snowflakes. These glow white when the temperature falls enough for ice to form, giving a visual warning to drivers.

The technology is limited by the fact that an icy road may be buried under snow, but the intention is that this technology could eventually develop using infrastructure-to-car technology, with changes in road surface condition being communicated wirelessly to oncoming vehicles.

These examples help to move the road further forwards without drastic changes to road infrastructure or undue challenge to public acceptance of the norm. But there's plenty more scope to make roads smarter.

Alongside adaptive street lights and roadside pinwheel electricity generators, a further stage of Roosegaard's original concept featured plans to make the highway a power source, with dedicated wireless charging lanes for EVs.

Induction charging already exists in consumer electronics like electric toothbrushes, but its use in vehicles is much less widespread. Since 2002, a fleet of 30 electric buses have been on the streets of Turin and Genoa in Italy, each driving 125 miles per day. And while they're charged at depots overnight, each bus route also features wireless charging points to top-up their cells.

Trials of wireless buses have also taken place in the US, Germany, and South Korea, while a new five-year trial has just begun in the UK that will be the most demanding to date – eight electric buses around the town of Milton Keynes for 17 hours per day, seven days a week for the next five years.

However, all suffer from the same limitation: wireless charging is currently restricted to stationary vehicles. Using the technology in buses that make regular stops and always use the same route makes sense. While such tech could be fitted to your driveway, the advantage of recharging on the move means any anxiety over range on a long-distance drive would be removed.

By Tom Phillips