Dutch glowing highway is going offline temporarily

Luminescent powder in paint has given a glow to 500 meters of Dutch highway, resulting in a trial section of glow-in-the-dark road. Designer Daan Roosegaarde, who won best future concept for the idea at the Dutch Design Awards in 2012, is collaborating with Heijmans, a Dutch civil engineering firm, to create such interactive highways. Almost two years later, the project is coming to fruition with some adjustments, according Slate.

The glowing roads of Oss aren’t working as planned and will be temporarily taken offline according to NOS (Google Translate), an outlet that’s part of the Netherlands Public Broadcasting system. The roads were only in the experimental phase, integrating a photo-luminescent powder into the paint to create the highway’s glowing ability. The current problem is that the light-absorbing stripes on provincial road N329 do not give off a consistent level of light across the 500m (0.3 mile) stretch. NOS reports this is due to the system’s inability to deal with moisture, a problem that was anticipated when the experiment started.