Rethinking Roadway Safety: Embracing Daytime Visibility Metrics
In a world where Teslas and autonomous vehicles are becoming increasingly common, it’s alarming to note that roadway fatalities remain a persistent issue. A significant portion of these accidents stems from lane departures, highlighting the crucial role of clear and visible roadway markings in ensuring driver safety.
Governments across the nation are responding with initiatives to enhance the visibility of paint lines and roadway striping. However, the current metric used to assess roadway markings, known as retro-reflectivity, focuses solely on nighttime performance, ignoring the equally important daytime visibility.
This narrow focus on nighttime conditions overlooks the fact that human drivers and vehicle cameras rely on paint lines in various lighting conditions, including daytime glare, rain, and fog. As a result, we often encounter signs that appear reflective at night but are barely visible during the day, or brand-new paint lines that vanish in wet weather.
To address this discrepancy, we need to embrace a more comprehensive approach to roadway safety by incorporating daytime visibility metrics. One promising technology that can revolutionize paint line assessments is computer vision, which simulates the human eye and is widely used in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
Computer vision offers a more accurate representation of how humans and autonomous vehicles perceive the roadway, enabling us to evaluate paint line performance under various conditions. By leveraging this technology, we can identify areas where markings need improvement, ensuring better visibility for all road users.
The adoption of computer vision for roadway assessments requires collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, roadway authorities, and technology providers. Partnerships like the one between Mobileye, a leading ADAS provider, and 3M, a manufacturer of roadway striping materials, demonstrate the potential of this approach in enhancing roadway safety.
As we strive towards Vision Zero, a world with zero fatalities, it’s imperative that we evolve our measurement of roadway success. By embracing full-time visibility metrics and leveraging computer vision technology, we can create safer roadways for human drivers and autonomous vehicles alike.
The 2026 FHWA paint line visibility rule presents an opportunity to usher in this new era of roadway safety. By adopting a forward-thinking approach, we can transform our roadways into safer spaces, reducing fatalities and supporting the growing adoption of driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technology.