In a small town about 60 miles southwest of Amsterdam lies a stretch of road with no streetlights. Instead, along some 15,000 feet of Highway N329, cars follow stripes of glowing green paint that illuminate the edges of the road like an airfield landing strip at night. Designer Daan Roosegaarde calls it the highway of the future.

For the past several years, Roosegaarde and his team of Dutch designers have been working on making these glowing lines a reality. This road in the Netherlands is the pilot project for Roosegaarde’s ambitious vision of replacing passive infrastructure with smart roads that communicate with drivers. He has big ideas—things like roadways that charge electric cars and color-changing paints that alert drivers to icy conditions. As cars get smarter, he argues, so too should the infrastructure that supports them.

“The road industry is one of the most conservative industries out there,” he says. “But I love them because they determine what a city looks like much more than the cars do. In a weird way, nobody cares about them. I think that should change.”

Roosegaard first unveiled the concept for the glowing roads in 2012. Since then he’s worked with Dutch company Heijmans to develop a luminous paint up to the task. Roosegaard says the stuff is like an supercharged version of traditional glowing paint, which uses luminescent powder to absorb solar energy. “It’s more advanced than the glow-in-the-dark paint you and I know, which only works for 30 minutes—completely useless,” he says. The designer wouldn’t delve into details of how the paint is made, but claims the luminescence will last up to eight hours after being charged by the sun. In case of extreme clouds and rain—a reasonable concern in the Netherlands—the roadways can be charged artificially using solar panels. “Even though it’s rainy most of the time in the Netherlands," says Roosegaarde. "It’s still good enough.”

This strip of road will be a testing ground for durability and usability before Roosegaarde and Heijmans roll it out to other countries and clients. Roosegaarde says the Dutch prime minister of infrastructure has asked the studio to build the 20 miles of the glowing roads along the Afsluitdijk, a large dike in the Netherlands. Tokyo has expressed interest in bringing the roads to the city for the 2020 Olympics, as have cities in the UK. “We got crazy calls from sheiks in Qatar who were asking, how much for 1,000 kilometers?” he says.

Studio Roosegaarde

The popularity isn’t surprising. The glowing roads are spectacle as much as they are a tool for building sustainability into our infrastructure. “I’m Dutch, so there’s always a pragmatic and poetic agenda,” Roosegaarde says. The designer believes that ultimately the practicality of glowing roads will outlast the novelty, especially as the price levels out in the coming years. (He wouldn't to say how much the glowing roads costs, only that it’s pricier than traditional street lighting at the moment.)

To Roosegaarde, the idea of imbuing the physical world with technology is inevitable, and glowing highways are just one of his concepts along these lines. He's also floated a proposal for replacing street lights with bioluminescent trees.

A mock-up of a bioluminescent tree. Source

Admittedly, Roosegaarde errs on the side of the fantastical when it comes to how technology can impact our cities—this is the same man who is building a massive vacuum cleaner to suck the smog out of a Beijing park. But large-scale urban whimsy isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there's always the chance these projects could prove perfectly sensible down the line. For Roosegaarde, the city is a laboratory and its problems are rich ground for this sort of experimentation. That is, for anyone who can put up with the red tape. “There is 80 percent bullshit to get 20 percent beauty,” Roosegaarde says. “But it’s worth it.”