There's the instant that's supposed to be "100 calories." And it's "cinnamon roll" flavored. And it's... TERRIBLE. Tastes like a packet of Sweet and Low. Don't get me wrong. I'm a positive food guy. I like all the foods. Everything. *That's* how lousy the Cinnamon Roll Oatmeal ("with artificial and natural sweeteners") was!
There's a great example of highway sign reflectivity in the Florida Keys. There are speed limit signs that say "speed limit 45" and "night 35" just below it. The 45 sign is only half reflective so that only "speed limit" is reflective but the 45 is not. The "night 35" sign is fully reflective. At night, all that can be seen is "speed limit night 35". Even when I'm right up at the sign, I can't see the 45 part at night.
in Germany we do the same for the "right on red" signs: They are the only signs explicitly banned from being reflective - because it's much more difficult to see others (especially pedestrians!) in the dark.
Washington State had speed limit signs like that in the 1960's and into the '70's, (speed limit 70; trucks/night 60) but they disappeared when the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit was introduced.
@@RoadGuyRob Yes, on Big Pine Key. Very easy to find on Google Maps because US-1 takes a significant turn to the north. The speed limit was put in place because the island has Key Deer that roam freely over the key (I almost hit one once) and they're considered endangered because Big Pine Key is the only place they can be found in the world. Those speed limit signs are only on Big Pine Key and the rest of the Overseas Highway has normal speed limit signs.
One of the most effective ways of knowing that your headlights are on is looking at signs and lane markers to see if they're reflecting light back at you as the car lights ahead and behind you aren't going to result in much light reflecting to you.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeThis doesn't work in Canada because car headlights are always on and the lowest the lowest setting (daytime) is easily bright enough to light up a sign. The best solution is to have an analog dashboard where the dash lights are only on with the headlights. On newer cars I've arrived home and discovered I forgot to turn on the headlights or accidentally knocked them out of 'auto' (i.e. they were in daytime mode). On older cars that would be impossible since I wouldn't have been able to see the dashboard, making it immediately obvious.
@@OntarioTrafficMan Yes exactly - and this situation leaves you driving around with no taillights... And it's OBVIOUSLY less safe driving at night without taillights vs driving in daylight without headlights... We're living in Idiocracy!
@@OntarioTrafficMan Unfortunately, here in the US it's still the case that the dash lights come on with the low (daytime/fog) headlight setting, so it's possible to engage that one by accident and not notice the headlights aren't fully on. (It's mostly easy to avoid that by just never using that setting.)
What's funny: In my weird education pathway, I only took non-calculus high school physics (in the year... gulp... 2000!) My physics knowledge is a bit... *light*
In fairness, that's pretty low in California's priority list (considering how many people live here). Even Palm Springs, where I was filming, struggles to have dark skies simply because the city nearby is so bright at night. But yes, retroreflectivity is a fantastic tool for the "dark skies" movement.
You should head down to Escondido. There are dark sky ordinances in place such as zero cut-off street lights and high pressure sodium lamps, due to the huge observatory just north of there at Palomar Mountain.
It's cool because it's basically the opposite of Stealth technology. In stealth they try to have radar bounce away from the source, whereas with road signs the goal is to bounce the light back towards the source.
Though a similar technology CAN be used for passive radar JAMMING, where a normal airplane has a signature the size of a city block to cover what other planes are doing.
They sell radar reflectors for sailboats (sails unfortunately do not reflect radar very well). It's just 3 metal circles intersecting each other at 90 degrees, to make 8 inside cube corners. You just mount or tie it onto your mast, and your sailboat will light up on radar. (Circles so it won't damage the sails if they flap onto it.)
I'd say 'amazon rain forest' instead of weeds. Dishwashers, turn signals (yippee, I have an amber-colored one), Christmas tree lights. Electric stoves. The guy does cover quite an assortment of stuff. I don't recall when he did the video on this topic, so I am going to go and look for it. Thanks for the reminder.
Fun fact: the Apollo crews left retro-reflectors on the moon at the landing sites. So, the ultimate moon landing hoax conspiracy theory debunker is the ability to shoot a laser at the moon and record how much of that laser comes back, which is none due to scattering. But, if you aim it right at the coordinates of one of the retro-reflectors, you will measure a return beam of light, possible only if man had actually gone up there and put those retro-reflectors in place.
Obviously, the reason for that is accurately measuring the distance to the Moon, but it does serve as arguably the most reliable evidence that people were up there. It's just unfortunate that the reflector is so small that it can't be seen on Earth by amateurs.
Not to say humans didn’t go to the moon, but those retroreflectors could have been sent and left to sit without any human taking the trip with them. Just as we have done with other equipment on the moon and mars. Those retroreflectors unfortunately do not at all prove humans were on the surface of the moon with them.
@@danielwatson5595 True, but we didn't have robotic space vehicles in the 60's when the moon landings happened. The first Mars rover landed in 1997, and the first 'probe' of any kind was 1976, but that wouldn't have been able to bring something the size of the retroreflectors with it.
"The ultimate moon landing hoax conspiracy theory debunker is the ability to shoot a laser at the moon and record how much of that laser comes back..." That really isn't a good debunker in any way. Play devil's advocate. Entertain the idea that the hoaxers are right. In this case - The only people that have the equipment to do this form of testing are exactly the people with a motive to fix the result. They could just be using a smoke and mirror machine that spits out exactly their expected answer. This isn't any different than one of those perpetual motion or cold fusion orgs that will only provide data from their own measuring equipment. If we actually know they're honest, it's good info. If we're skeptical, we need outside tangible verification. There is *MUCH* better evidence than the retroreflectors.
60 years ago when I was a kid growing up in California, I remember the cat's eyes in the signs. They didn't work very well, but I could see them with very little problem. My 40-year old mother, on the other hand, could hardly see them at all. So since I was the oldest in the family, I was given the front seat and tasked with reading the road signs to her on long trips (such as San Jose to Los Angeles) where she wasn't familiar with the road. After a few trips, I graduated to Navigator and, armed with a road map and enough sugared road snacks to keep a rock awake, told her where to turn to get us there (just call me Garmin :). Today at 68, I can still see the road signs very well thanks to the road sign technology, and have no problems with my road trips between Phoenix and Boston.
I guess there is quite a bit of individual differences too - not just age. I have never seen those signs with cat eyes (maybe not old enough and they perhaps was not used in my country - Sweden). But for example most people (even those much younger than me - I'm also 40 my self now) is more sensitive to being blinded by bright light in the dark, than me and take longer to regain their vision when they for example pass someone, who who forget to turn their high beams off - or when they for example comes from dark roads into a section that has street lighting, then go back to unlit roads again. When I drive on a freeway, I prefer to drive with high beams all the time, as I like to go at high speed and want to see far ahead. I'm also not bothered at all if oncoming drivers do the same (the distance and angle of lights from oncoming trafic, is much greater there compared to a narrow country road - and that's enough for it to not be blinding). But some drivers think otherwise and start to flash their lights to turn off the high beams already like 500 meters before passing - those drivers are really annoying. Also during daytime and bright sunlight - many people think it's very bothersome to drive without sunglasses. I have no problem at all with that either and think sunglasses are mostly annoying as it gives worse vison when for example going thru a tunnel. But with that said, it's pretty cool how much difference those retro reflective surfaces actually do. Even a tiny cell phone flash light can easily light up signs like 100 m away and make them readable. When driving with high beams in the dark, the problem is sometimes the opposite in my opinion. Signs (especially large ones) reflect so much light they become slightly bliding and makes it harder to see hazards that might be behind the sign (for example animals on the road). But still good that they are clearly visible at long distances with just low beams.
@@Speeder84XL Agreed! I'm finding the hwy signs to be reflecting TOO MUCH light - to the point it's glare that detracts from seeing the road! As with everything else, "technology" has taken things a bit too far...😓
On country roads in Alberta, Canada, stop signs are frequently accompanied by a flashing, battery-powered red beacon, which is recharged in the daylight hours from a small solar panel.
I saw quite a few of those on the rural roads near Palm Springs, California where I filmed this video. I purposely avoided filming them to keep the storyline simple. But they are a big help at night, aren't they?
In my area, stop signs either have red LEDs along the border of the stop sign or a traffic light style beacon (sometimes accompanied by a flashing yellow beacon on the main road).
Around here (suburban SF bay area), I see the flashing lights on stop signs mostly in places where the stop signs are (1) newly added, and/or (2) hard to see because the road is so wide and the signs are at the sides (with the result that people would frequently run the stop signs by accident, due to not noticing them.)
@@gwillen There's another kind of beacon in my current area (Western North Carolina) that I haven't seen much anywhere else, which is signs that say something to the effect of "Vehicle Entering When Flashing" with the red or yellow flashing lights (red for a road with a STOP sign, yellow for the main road).
@@PaulFisher Yeah, you can see really well at 4:45 that he's wearing, I believe, an ANSI/ISEA 107 class 3 vest. Where I work (as a flagger), they make us wear a class 2 vest with class E pants or gaiters, which makes the overall outfit a class 3.
BTW, there's a retroreflector on the moon which we put there decades ago. You can't see it with most standard telescopes, but this is how distance to the moon is now measured very accurately. Bounce laser pulses from a high-power laser, then check for relections and time between them.
There are actually 6 retroreflectors on the Moon. Three left by Apollo, two on Russian rovers, and one on an Indian lander. You can't "see" them with any telescope. It requires powerful laser light sources and photomultiplier detectors on telescopes that count individual photons coming back from the Moon.
@@Nicoder6884 Sure, you can argue that point all day long - but it apparently hasn't occurred to you this doesn't automatically prove *_manned_* missions... 😉
@@Nicoder6884 I was just pointing out that they could've been placed there by remote controlled craft is all... Far more likely than aliens - which I suppose is possible, but I don't buy into the alien agenda, lol.
The material we use to make signs in our shop is the 3M DG Cubed prismatic retro-reflective sheeting. It is on a whole level of its own compared to all the avery sheeting, and even the other 3M sheeting, and the SF price isnt super bad at about $2 per SF currently when bought in 48"x50YD rolls. A 10 year old sign with the 3M DG3 sheeting is brighter than brand new signs made with Avery sheeting. The opportunity cost though is the 3M sheeting is SUPER hard to cut compared to the Avery, we have to use a special hot tip machine that uses a carbide tip at just under 1,000F and about 450grams of force to cut the 3M sheeting and it can only cut at about 5 mm/s
Holly carp! Is it made from carbon fiber?? That's some hefty stuff! (Ha.. just googled it and found DG stands for Diamond Grade. Maybe it _IS_ made with carbon fiber! Bucky tubes, maybe?)
Wow the cell phone light example was pretty cool. It’s one thing to say they are effective but to see those signs light up like that made it clear how effective they are.
I drove on I-80 from PA to Wyoming several times in the early 70's and I recall very few retro-reflective signs along the way. They stood out and were colorful, which helped break the monotony of driving across Nebraska at night.
Back in the 60s and early 70s, Michigan had a maximum speed limit of 65 by day and 55 at night. They had signs that displayed the 65 speed limit, but at night, when the headlights hit it, it displayed 55. I used to sit in the back seat and watch the sign as we went by and see it change back to 65 as the headlights were no longer affecting it.
There are times when the retroreflective signs dont work at night. Condensation on the sign. I see it sometimes in my area where the signs are barely readable. Took me awhile to figure out why.
The BEST infrastructure is the stuff you don't notice cause it just does it's job. Like the classic saying "a servant is seen but unheard." A good bridge, sign, pipe, wire, pump, whatever is best doing it's job when no one notices. And road signs are just...there, yeah?
Watching from the UK - you randomly popped up in my recommendations. Fascinating video. The 'retroreflectorization' technology is, of course, the same across Europe but I read a report recently from Finland that there is some concern that modern LED and Xenon headlights may not be 'lighting up' the signs so well as the older lights. This is because they can easily dazzle oncoming cars unless they are very precisely directed down and also little light escapes from the beam pattern meaning less light actually falls on the sign. Can't say I've actually noticed it myself. Also your reference to 'cat eyes' made me sit up. In the UK we have a well developed system of 'cat's eyes' on our motorways (🇺🇸 highways) with white ones dividing the lanes, red ones at the edge of the road (the left for us) and amber ones near the central reservation (the right for us). Also we have green ones denoting lines that can be crossed like on slip roads (🇺🇸 = ramps). We do have them on some other roads as well.
What a great story about innovation in an engineering approach setting (by engineering approach I mean a system where problems are iteratively tracked downed, diagnosed, and solved towards an end goal).
It’s amazed me for a long time that I could see the reflection of my turn signal in a road sign hundreds of feet away. I had a little bit of understanding of how that was done but now thanks to you, I really understand it completely. This is your best video yet!
Turn signals also tend to show up really well on far away road signs even though they're dimmer than headlights since they're angled upwards to be visible to other drivers, rather than downwards to not blind them.
@@galaxyanimal Oh, that makes sense, really interesting. I had noticed that the turn signals were very prominent on the reflection. It's a good thing we can only see our own turn signals because otherwise it would be a cacophony of blinking signs!
One thing I always find super cool is how the reflectors on the ground will tell if you are on the right side of the road depending on the color I never noticed that until recently
It doesn’t just save energy. It also reduces light pollution. When driving at night in the rain, I almost _prefer_ an unlit intersection, because when the road is wet, any street lights reflect off of the road surface, obscuring lane markings.
These hidden technologies are lifesavers! Driving in many poorer countries with their impossible to see Stop/Alto/Pare signs at night really made me appreciate what we take for granted.
Personally as someone who drives for a living, I would like to see overhead highway signs with a green Engineer Grade background with either HIP or Diamond Grade high reflective type lettering. Here they use High Intensity Prismatic grades for both the background and the lettering, and the visibility is awful.
I agree. I also prefer the high contrast between the old glass dots and the non-reflective green background. The "newer" fully reflective signs are illegible when exposed to any significant bright light. I started noticing this while driving on the New York State Thruway (I-87) in the mid-2000s, almost twenty years ago. I don't travel that highway very much anymore.
@PrograError that's how the signs are in Canadian national parks. They use a non reflective dark green paint or vinyl with Diamond Grade. Sometimes the lettering and bordering falls off because the paint doesn't allow it to stick very well 😂
@RoadGuyRob in theory, the higher contrast would make visibility much better. Make the lettering a bit thinner so it looks more like letters and not a bright blob as you drive up. I feel like California should update their ancient freeway signs with this, and use Clearview font for extra visibility (and potential controversy among motorists and sign geeks alike).
Glad to hear! You're welcome. The funny part about researching these stories is that whatever topic I'm working on, I begin to notice as well while I'm driving.
i was shocked to find out they don't have streetlighting in america, i was driving a major road in florida and it was a real shock to find the only lighting was from headlights.
It depends substantially on where you are, as is the case with most other things in America. Even the same highway can go from well-lit to totally dark in just a few miles.
@@warrior_cat Yes, around here we have so many streetlights that it can be hard to know if your headlights are turned on. I usually have to look at the signs to verify that the lights are on and that it's not just the indicator that's lit. But, when I get outside the city limits, some of those more rural roads have hardly any streetlights at all. It makes me really appreciate my wife's automatic headlights that activate and deactivate the high beams based on whether it's dark and whether there are other cars in range. Allows me to get full use of the high beams without blinding other drivers.
It depends on the location of the road really. I'm from the UK which is a tiny place, most of the highways here are only lit around big interchanges or near towns and cities.
I suspect the sheer magnitude of our suburbs and rural highway network makes fully illuminating everything very cost-prohibitive. Downtowns (good ones) are well lit at night.
well it really depends on the size of the country and where ya at, Rural v Urban, large country v small country. tho one benefit of that is the light pollution. You can see the Milky Way... the urbanites can never see that, not unless they go miles outside the city limits...
Found out the other day that there's actually more to this story than retroreflectivity. You touched on it a bit with the distance between the height of the driver and the height of the headlight and how that angle is more pronounced for truck drivers, but that's also one reason why some states tilt the signs down a tad to reduce the angle that the return light has to travel from the sign. Depending on the height of the sign (and how tall the sign itself is), they might still be needing to light the sign because of that angle. That's doubly true for those larger "arrow-per-lane" signs along freeways/expressways.
Very interesting deep dive! Well done! Another interesting future video idea (if not done before), is how the road signs font has changed over the years.
As far as I can tell, there really have been only 3 in the United States. An original font that evolved into the Highway Gothic we use now. And a copyrighted experimental font called Clearview that has mixed opinions. But yes, I do want to do a story on that. I'm just not sure who to interview, since I'm pretty sure the authors of the Highway Gothic font have long passed on.
You know what's even better than retro reflective and lighted signs? Background lit signs. Where the light passes through the graphical element which gives perfect clarity regardless of if your headlights hit the sign or not. An LCD monitor is a backlit sign that can also change its contents on the fly. Where i live, we have a few signs like that which adjust based on current state of traffic. Even single point LED signs (less resolution) work wonders.
Also, we've had ONLY retroreflective signs before technology advanced. Not a single "just painted" sign anywhere. At least not official signs. It's codified into law, every sign NO MATTER it's purpose is retro reflective here. Except the backlit ones with or without dynamic content.
As an artist many years ago, I got my hands on some of the glass beads used in street striping. It was very fine, like sand and I joyfully added it to many of my mixed media works. The in-person effect was wonderful and gave the pieces life as light changed in the room. But then I learned it made photographing the works simply impossible! I had to scrap the idea because photography is key to a working artist.
One of the still-unsolved problems is overhead sign readability just after sunset on westbound roads. Because the twilight sky behind the sign is still far brighter than car headlights, the signs appear dark and are completely unreadable. That’s where active lighting still has a place, regardless of how much money or electricity it would save to not have it.
Tangent topic but I think the Victorian government (Australia) was or has introduced photoluminescent paint on roads to make it easier to see the path while driving in night. It’s useful because you don’t have to install obstructive and disruptive (to wildlife) light poles in the middle of nowhere to light up a rural road. It’s powered by the sun from daylight and can last in many conditions. Pretty sure it was rolled out in the Great Alpine Road.
Thanks for the interesting video. I use retroreflective tape on my bicycle wheel rims & cranks, the moving motion reflected back to drivers catches their attention quicker, especially in the peripherals. Another bit of science to help cyclists stay safe at night.
I have a theory that flashing lights actually attract sleepy drivers. It explains why so many cop cars can get hit in the middle of nowhere...it's not just chance.
I'm in awe at the technology which is good for your mood, its why going outside is good for your mood. Because you're in awe at the huge space and possibilities
The way we do the painting of traffic lanes are interesting too, traffic lanes (at least for the highways that I know of) are supposed to be reflective so you can see them easily at night. How the process I’ve taken part of works is you paint the lines with either the yellow or white paint you need to and after applying paint you throw glass beads over the wet paint and it’s supposed reflect the color of the paint.
This explains an interesting effect I noticed when using an LED headlamp while riding my bike. Normally I have a light mounted on my handlebars, which does a passable job lighting up street signs. With the headlamp, positioned right near my eyes on my helmet, road signs and license plates pop out almost comically, like I'm riding through a video game.
They actually used the same technology in the 1996 miniseries "Neverwhere." Peter Capaldi (yes, the future Twelfth Doctor) played the angel Islington, and his costume was essentially a cloak made out of retroreflective material. And in addition to the regular set lighting, there was an additional light on the camera, which made it look like Islington was clothed in light.
Fun fact: While LA has a lot of those, San Diego county has had few-lit signs and barely any street lights for most of the century, due to the two observatories - Palomar and Mt Laguna - pushing for strong light pollution laws. Our streets and freeways are pretty dark across the board, especially from the sky. Check it out next time you’re flying into SAN at night!
One advantage of winter here in Finland is that highway signage usually gets checked twice a year, because the speed limits are lowered for winter time. That's why outside of urban areas the speed limit signs would never be too old. They would just discard the ones that had gone bad and replace them with new ones during the next change. There are also variations of signs with a a hinge running in the middle of the sign, from top to bottom. Someone could then go and flip the sign to show a lower or higher speed limit. On motorways, the signs today are mostly remote controlled or even LED displays rather than just signs. I imagine that the LED displays are specialized to direct the light towards the oncoming car?
Wouldn't the LED just need to light up itself? There's no need to bother with the reflectiveness in that case, it only needs to show up during the brightest sun.
@@PrograError I know that arrow/message boards are required to be dimmed at night; I'd imagine it would be the same for variable speed limit signs. My workzone installer training glossed over things like that since the company I work for doesn't really use them (it's primarily a flagging company).
I've worked on some industrial printers that are used to make these signs and have talked with some of the operators at print shops. The legal requirements for specific traffic colors needs some careful color calibration. Every state and municipality seem to have their own set of requirements that any shop wanting to bid on these jobs has to be able to comply with. Working with these printers was an education.
I got quite a lot of reflective tape (more than I've really needed!) and love putting it on everything. On that note, slightly unrelated, but I refuse to go outside at night without wearing something reflective - the first time I realised how bad visibility can be at night, I was genuinely shocked, and every little thing to give people an opportunity to react to you helps...
I live in Germany since 27 years and haven't seen a single illuminated traffic sign so far. Guess we're really ahead of the US in everything but obesity rate
I'm slowly phasing it in, depending on when I shot the raw material for the video (some are still pre-new vest). I almost got hit by a car while I was filming in the dark with my old vest (my fault). Thankfully the driver saw me at the last minute. I decided if I'm going to stand near the street, I better wear the proper safety equipment (PPE).
@@RoadGuyRob maybe you can do some mythbusting with the different PPE designs, some from overseas, some with local US standards… like to see if the standards make much sense... vest vs suit. Painted vs retroreflective. sounds like a perfect PSA video too...
I think it's actually a class 3 vest, since it's got retroreflective stripes on the sleeves. I have to wear a class 2 vest for work, but they make us wear class E pants/gaiters so the whole outfit is class 3 as well.
@@galaxyanimal actually you're right. I missed the sleeves. Nice catch! I kept commenting on his previous videos hoping he would finally get a better vest, happy he has now!
I remember going for a walk one day and finding some broken chunks of the road. I looked at them and saw tons of little glass beads in the road paint. I thought about it for a bit and decided it must be reflecting the light back toward the source, causs I have no clue what other function it was serving. That's how I came to know about the glass beads. It was a pretty fun discovery
CastAR has an augmented reality system that uses glasses with tiny projectors and a retoreeflective surface (say a game board, or a wall of it in a simulator). Your eyes get to focus on what's distant (rather than having the virtual image an inch from your eyeball). And it apparently makes for great D&D style games, where every player sees their own display (think fog of war), even though they're all looking at the same sheet. Pretty clever use of the stuff!
was driving to a party early this year during the dark and discovered these flashing road signs for the very first time. they damn near caused a crash because i couldn't see anything but them and they were super distracting.
Many, many years ago I noticed something strange. If I was far back from a sign and there was a car closer to the sign, the sign would not be very bright. But if I turned on my high beams, the sign would get much brighter. I originally assumed that my lights were much better than those on the car in front of me. When I learned about retroreflecting surfaces, I realized that it was simply a matter of my lights reflecting straight back to me. Also, my high beams likely did little to brighten the sign for the closer driver as it would not reflect directly back to him.
I've got a pretty good idea for red light runner detection!!! Keep the inductive loops but stretch the distance to about 500 feet. When the system detects a vehicle moving (fast) that cannot stop, the red light goes to emergency flashing red. When the cars are all stopped, or able to stop, the flashing emergency red turns off. Red fire truck lights that turn on if the system detects a fast-moving vehicle could also warn the drivers who are sitting at the green light. It could warn someone that a vehicle is about to run the red light and avoid a T-bone collision. When the green light illuminates and the flashing red is off, people would know that it is safe to enter the intersection. If they are waiting to go on the green, and the red emergency flashing red lights up, they would know that someone is about to run the red light, and they can stop before entering the intersection----cool!
Let me ask you this, how much of your cars high beam headlights do you really want to be reflected directly back into your eyes? I live in a rural area where when driving at night what you are trying to see are the not very reflective animals, like moose, bear, deer, raccoon, skunk, the occasional cow and many others. To try to avoid these hazards I use my high beams as much as possible and even dim the instrument cluster to aid my night vision. Since they started to replace all the signs with new ones that have this much reflectivity, in some cases it makes the roads less safe. I can understand stop signs being that reflective, you need to see it with enough time to stop, but many other signs I don't need to be able to see from so far away. And it gets even worse when there is a group of signs placed near each other. If I leave my high beams on approaching some of the bigger signs or groups of signs, it is hard to see anything at all beyond the signs and once passed and back into darkness, your night vision takes some time to recover.
I have the same problem, and find the excessive reflection distracting, and like you said, hard to recover from after the signs are gone. I avoid driving at night now. It's a good excuse sometimes...😀
@@kenofken9458 Yeah why do they put high beam headlights on cars? I would suggest that if you are driving at night and not using your high beams when there is no reason not to, maybe you shouldn't be driving yet. But it is not really the point, even on low beam some of these signs are very bright, and anything that reduces how far you can see in areas with lots of wildlife makes it more dangerous. Even without these signs as a factor people hit animals or other hazards on the road all the time.
@@KevinW-px8is The only place high beams are any use at all to people with functional night vision is on truly dark country roads which will have next to nothing in the way of signage. If it's deer season, your only safe option is to slow down.
@@kenofken9458 Do you even read what you are responding to? As I said in my first post I live in a very rural area that is very dark and the roads have plenty of signs especially the yellow ones that I find the most offensive. They are used to warn of curves and other such hazards of which there are many on the roads I drive on, and on these types of roads the signs are generally closer to the road (shoulder mounted) than in other locations. I don't know where you get your ideas, but high beams aren't used to help you see better at night but to see farther, giving you more time to react to roadway hazards. I have no idea what you mean by deer season, and our deer seem unaware of it as well, and will run out in front of you year round. Texas A&M University did a study of the effect of road sign reflectivity (that didn't even use the worst offending yellow signs) and in its conclusion found that: Based on the findings from this study, there is evidence that shoulder-mounted signs can be too bright in rural areas with low or no visual complexity. While there was no measured reduction in legibility, there was a large reduction in the overall ability to detect potentially hazardous objects near the roadway. In other words, the detection distances were shorter when signs were within 200 ft of the targets. More specifically, the average detection distance of the three objects with no sign was 371 ft. When there was a sign with Type III material, the detection distance decreased to about 302 ft. When the sign sheeting was Type XI material, the detection distance decreased even more to 258 ft.
You can get a 2D version of the retroreflector if you put two wall mirrors at 90 degrees to each other. No matter where you stand, the middle of your face will be right where the two mirrors meet. This setup is common in clothing stores.
“One of the losers in terms of technology are these old-school backlit street signs”. I invite you to Michigan, my friend. We simply MUST have backlit “only”, “one-way”, “no left turn”, etc signs in traffic signal setups.
I think that it's funny that California has them, but I'm a few hours from the Canadian border where we get over 16 hours worth of darkness during the night, and we have never had lit signs like that. Or at least not in the decades that I've been living here. If folks know where to look, those lighted street signs can probably be bought when they're taken out of service. Around here, you can buy used street signs to hang in your room if you want to as a way of recouping some of the cost of the signs.
@@RoadGuyRob I gotta tell ya, my motto is “you can always layer up, but you can’t always layer down”… I love the cold and snow. But to answer your question, usually the autumn and spring months (September/October, and March/April) are pretty neutral in the temperature and mosquito departments.
In Las Vegas, NV, we use the backlit signs on traffic poles for the street names on signaled intersections, like those ones from CA you showed. Some of those have been replaced by thinner backlight signs, which I assume are using LEDs for the backlighting, especially ones where they recently replaced entire traffic poles and their assemblies, but most of them are still those California style ones. North Las Vegas, does not use the backlighted street signs on a lot of their signaled intersections.
Glass-bead reflectorization was used for license plates starting with Georgia in 1941, but they only worked well when the plates were brand new. After awhile the rough surface of the beads on the surface of the paint got dirty and lost reflectivity. When 3M began producing Scotchlite reflective sheeting by the late 1960s, that became the way license plates attained their current appearance.
I live in Phoenix, and every time I drive to California for something I still see those cat eye reflectors on their signs in random places. So weird that they haven't gone through and replaced all their signage in that long! Phoenix, well ADOT, replaces their songs anytime there's regulation change. Like now they've taken all the signs across the valley that are light up or they had lights underneath them or above them to eliminate the sign at night, those all disappeared probably a decade ago or so with the highly reflective signs. He was like a miracle the first time I drove on the highway or freeway without having those signs lit up and as I'm driving it's like it's lit up just for me and me alone. They'll clear from other people's headlights or anything it was the craziest thing I'd ever seen! Also with ADOT throughout some very particular about cleaning up any graffiti or anything and they have a 24 hours or less rule that any graffiti reported or seen is eliminated within 24 hours. And they are sure as shit on it! Meanwhile you go to California and it just feels like a dump. All the freeways are completely encased in graffiti and it looks so bad there. And even people get up on the overhead signs on the walkways catwalks and spray paint on top of the signs for the roadway. But I guess crap like that happens whenever you're a blue state and you let everybody get away with everything and I'll just let them steal everything and leave the store we won't prosecute them. I would hate my life so badly if I lived in California! The only good things I've come out of that is in and out burger and a handful of movies
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
So what kind of oatmeal did you have today?
-this was a grape nuts morning-
@@winterwatson6437 😅
There's the instant that's supposed to be "100 calories." And it's "cinnamon roll" flavored. And it's... TERRIBLE. Tastes like a packet of Sweet and Low.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a positive food guy. I like all the foods. Everything. *That's* how lousy the Cinnamon Roll Oatmeal ("with artificial and natural sweeteners") was!
@@RoadGuyRob There is but one flavor of oatmeal: oatmeal flavor.
@@jovetj with lots of brown sugar.
There's a great example of highway sign reflectivity in the Florida Keys. There are speed limit signs that say "speed limit 45" and "night 35" just below it. The 45 sign is only half reflective so that only "speed limit" is reflective but the 45 is not. The "night 35" sign is fully reflective. At night, all that can be seen is "speed limit night 35". Even when I'm right up at the sign, I can't see the 45 part at night.
in Germany we do the same for the "right on red" signs: They are the only signs explicitly banned from being reflective - because it's much more difficult to see others (especially pedestrians!) in the dark.
Washington State had speed limit signs like that in the 1960's and into the '70's, (speed limit 70; trucks/night 60) but they disappeared when the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit was introduced.
That's really clever. Is that on US-1?
@@RoadGuyRob Yes, specifically on the Big Pine Key
@@RoadGuyRob Yes, on Big Pine Key. Very easy to find on Google Maps because US-1 takes a significant turn to the north. The speed limit was put in place because the island has Key Deer that roam freely over the key (I almost hit one once) and they're considered endangered because Big Pine Key is the only place they can be found in the world. Those speed limit signs are only on Big Pine Key and the rest of the Overseas Highway has normal speed limit signs.
I remember having a candle. A literal candle that lit up a speed sigh from 60 feet away. It was amazing how much it lit up.
One of the most effective ways of knowing that your headlights are on is looking at signs and lane markers to see if they're reflecting light back at you as the car lights ahead and behind you aren't going to result in much light reflecting to you.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeThis doesn't work in Canada because car headlights are always on and the lowest the lowest setting (daytime) is easily bright enough to light up a sign.
The best solution is to have an analog dashboard where the dash lights are only on with the headlights. On newer cars I've arrived home and discovered I forgot to turn on the headlights or accidentally knocked them out of 'auto' (i.e. they were in daytime mode). On older cars that would be impossible since I wouldn't have been able to see the dashboard, making it immediately obvious.
@@OntarioTrafficMan
Yes exactly - and this situation leaves you driving around with no taillights... And it's OBVIOUSLY less safe driving at night without taillights vs driving in daylight without headlights... We're living in Idiocracy!
@@OntarioTrafficMan Unfortunately, here in the US it's still the case that the dash lights come on with the low (daytime/fog) headlight setting, so it's possible to engage that one by accident and not notice the headlights aren't fully on. (It's mostly easy to avoid that by just never using that setting.)
I got freaked out hitting a vape once when the tiny blue light on the bottom reflected off some surprisingly bright sign in the distance
physics lesson AND a road infrastructure video combined in one? What a great way to start my Friday!
What's funny: In my weird education pathway, I only took non-calculus high school physics (in the year... gulp... 2000!)
My physics knowledge is a bit... *light*
The other important point of ditching the bulbs other than resource and money savings is it reduces the amount of light pollution our cities create.
In fairness, that's pretty low in California's priority list (considering how many people live here). Even Palm Springs, where I was filming, struggles to have dark skies simply because the city nearby is so bright at night.
But yes, retroreflectivity is a fantastic tool for the "dark skies" movement.
You should head down to Escondido. There are dark sky ordinances in place such as zero cut-off street lights and high pressure sodium lamps, due to the huge observatory just north of there at Palomar Mountain.
It's cool because it's basically the opposite of Stealth technology. In stealth they try to have radar bounce away from the source, whereas with road signs the goal is to bounce the light back towards the source.
Though a similar technology CAN be used for passive radar JAMMING, where a normal airplane has a signature the size of a city block to cover what other planes are doing.
I wonder if you just put the film on backwards, does it make it never light up?
They sell radar reflectors for sailboats (sails unfortunately do not reflect radar very well). It's just 3 metal circles intersecting each other at 90 degrees, to make 8 inside cube corners. You just mount or tie it onto your mast, and your sailboat will light up on radar. (Circles so it won't damage the sails if they flap onto it.)
That's a part of stealthy, yeah. Coatings and the use of high-carbon composite materials along edges are also crucial. (to absorb instead of reflect)
H vc@@galaxyanimal
If you want to get into the weeds, technology connections spent almost an hour taking about this tech.
I just bought many many boxes of Great Value powder dishwasher detergent.
I was hoping someone would mention him
I'd say 'amazon rain forest' instead of weeds. Dishwashers, turn signals (yippee, I have an amber-colored one), Christmas tree lights. Electric stoves. The guy does cover quite an assortment of stuff. I don't recall when he did the video on this topic, so I am going to go and look for it. Thanks for the reminder.
@@bikenydon't forget the best toaster ever made!
@@bikenyHe inspired me to get my Ioniq 5 lol
Fun fact: the Apollo crews left retro-reflectors on the moon at the landing sites. So, the ultimate moon landing hoax conspiracy theory debunker is the ability to shoot a laser at the moon and record how much of that laser comes back, which is none due to scattering. But, if you aim it right at the coordinates of one of the retro-reflectors, you will measure a return beam of light, possible only if man had actually gone up there and put those retro-reflectors in place.
Obviously, the reason for that is accurately measuring the distance to the Moon, but it does serve as arguably the most reliable evidence that people were up there. It's just unfortunate that the reflector is so small that it can't be seen on Earth by amateurs.
Not to say humans didn’t go to the moon, but those retroreflectors could have been sent and left to sit without any human taking the trip with them. Just as we have done with other equipment on the moon and mars. Those retroreflectors unfortunately do not at all prove humans were on the surface of the moon with them.
I hope the next humans to land on the moon place huge reflectors in the shape of the letters C H A.
@@danielwatson5595 True, but we didn't have robotic space vehicles in the 60's when the moon landings happened. The first Mars rover landed in 1997, and the first 'probe' of any kind was 1976, but that wouldn't have been able to bring something the size of the retroreflectors with it.
"The ultimate moon landing hoax conspiracy theory debunker is the ability to shoot a laser at the moon and record how much of that laser comes back..."
That really isn't a good debunker in any way. Play devil's advocate. Entertain the idea that the hoaxers are right.
In this case - The only people that have the equipment to do this form of testing are exactly the people with a motive to fix the result. They could just be using a smoke and mirror machine that spits out exactly their expected answer. This isn't any different than one of those perpetual motion or cold fusion orgs that will only provide data from their own measuring equipment.
If we actually know they're honest, it's good info. If we're skeptical, we need outside tangible verification.
There is *MUCH* better evidence than the retroreflectors.
60 years ago when I was a kid growing up in California, I remember the cat's eyes in the signs. They didn't work very well, but I could see them with very little problem. My 40-year old mother, on the other hand, could hardly see them at all. So since I was the oldest in the family, I was given the front seat and tasked with reading the road signs to her on long trips (such as San Jose to Los Angeles) where she wasn't familiar with the road. After a few trips, I graduated to Navigator and, armed with a road map and enough sugared road snacks to keep a rock awake, told her where to turn to get us there (just call me Garmin :). Today at 68, I can still see the road signs very well thanks to the road sign technology, and have no problems with my road trips between Phoenix and Boston.
I guess there is quite a bit of individual differences too - not just age. I have never seen those signs with cat eyes (maybe not old enough and they perhaps was not used in my country - Sweden). But for example most people (even those much younger than me - I'm also 40 my self now) is more sensitive to being blinded by bright light in the dark, than me and take longer to regain their vision when they for example pass someone, who who forget to turn their high beams off
- or when they for example comes from dark roads into a section that has street lighting, then go back to unlit roads again.
When I drive on a freeway, I prefer to drive with high beams all the time, as I like to go at high speed and want to see far ahead. I'm also not bothered at all if oncoming drivers do the same (the distance and angle of lights from oncoming trafic, is much greater there compared to a narrow country road - and that's enough for it to not be blinding). But some drivers think otherwise and start to flash their lights to turn off the high beams already like 500 meters before passing - those drivers are really annoying.
Also during daytime and bright sunlight - many people think it's very bothersome to drive without sunglasses. I have no problem at all with that either and think sunglasses are mostly annoying as it gives worse vison when for example going thru a tunnel.
But with that said, it's pretty cool how much difference those retro reflective surfaces actually do. Even a tiny cell phone flash light can easily light up signs like 100 m away and make them readable. When driving with high beams in the dark, the problem is sometimes the opposite in my opinion. Signs (especially large ones) reflect so much light they become slightly bliding and makes it harder to see hazards that might be behind the sign (for example animals on the road). But still good that they are clearly visible at long distances with just low beams.
@@Speeder84XL
Agreed! I'm finding the hwy signs to be reflecting TOO MUCH light - to the point it's glare that detracts from seeing the road! As with everything else, "technology" has taken things a bit too far...😓
How is it driving now fast gps compared to before
On country roads in Alberta, Canada, stop signs are frequently accompanied by a flashing, battery-powered red beacon, which is recharged in the daylight hours from a small solar panel.
I saw quite a few of those on the rural roads near Palm Springs, California where I filmed this video. I purposely avoided filming them to keep the storyline simple. But they are a big help at night, aren't they?
In my area, stop signs either have red LEDs along the border of the stop sign or a traffic light style beacon (sometimes accompanied by a flashing yellow beacon on the main road).
Around here (suburban SF bay area), I see the flashing lights on stop signs mostly in places where the stop signs are (1) newly added, and/or (2) hard to see because the road is so wide and the signs are at the sides (with the result that people would frequently run the stop signs by accident, due to not noticing them.)
@@gwillen There's another kind of beacon in my current area (Western North Carolina) that I haven't seen much anywhere else, which is signs that say something to the effect of "Vehicle Entering When Flashing" with the red or yellow flashing lights (red for a road with a STOP sign, yellow for the main road).
@@RoadGuyRob There are quite a few of them in rural and semi-suburban Florida as well.
Rob is the retro-reflective spot in my day.
The white stripes on his high-visibility vest are a perfect example of retro-reflection!
Retro-thanks (thanks bounced back to you), Allan!
@@PaulFisher Yeah, you can see really well at 4:45 that he's wearing, I believe, an ANSI/ISEA 107 class 3 vest.
Where I work (as a flagger), they make us wear a class 2 vest with class E pants or gaiters, which makes the overall outfit a class 3.
BTW, there's a retroreflector on the moon which we put there decades ago. You can't see it with most standard telescopes, but this is how distance to the moon is now measured very accurately. Bounce laser pulses from a high-power laser, then check for relections and time between them.
The retroreflector is also my favorite argument to use against moon landing deniers
There are actually 6 retroreflectors on the Moon. Three left by Apollo, two on Russian rovers, and one on an Indian lander. You can't "see" them with any telescope. It requires powerful laser light sources and photomultiplier detectors on telescopes that count individual photons coming back from the Moon.
@@Nicoder6884
Sure, you can argue that point all day long - but it apparently hasn't occurred to you this doesn't automatically prove *_manned_* missions... 😉
@@openeyes-411 Yeah, you're right lol. I suppose it also doesn't preclude the possibility of it being put there by aliens, either :P
@@Nicoder6884
I was just pointing out that they could've been placed there by remote controlled craft is all... Far more likely than aliens - which I suppose is possible, but I don't buy into the alien agenda, lol.
The material we use to make signs in our shop is the 3M DG Cubed prismatic retro-reflective sheeting. It is on a whole level of its own compared to all the avery sheeting, and even the other 3M sheeting, and the SF price isnt super bad at about $2 per SF currently when bought in 48"x50YD rolls. A 10 year old sign with the 3M DG3 sheeting is brighter than brand new signs made with Avery sheeting. The opportunity cost though is the 3M sheeting is SUPER hard to cut compared to the Avery, we have to use a special hot tip machine that uses a carbide tip at just under 1,000F and about 450grams of force to cut the 3M sheeting and it can only cut at about 5 mm/s
Holly carp! Is it made from carbon fiber?? That's some hefty stuff! (Ha.. just googled it and found DG stands for Diamond Grade. Maybe it _IS_ made with carbon fiber! Bucky tubes, maybe?)
Rob shed light on a topic that most drivers were in the dark.
Brilliant.
@@antoniusbaswara8477 👍💡
bahaha
Wow the cell phone light example was pretty cool.
It’s one thing to say they are effective but to see those signs light up like that made it clear how effective they are.
Yiour videos are fantastic! Such an engaging way to present a seemingly mundane topic. Thanks for sharing man. Stay great!
i love em too
Thank you so much! This particular video has sort of dragged along in the background since 2022. Big thanks to Ken!
I drove on I-80 from PA to Wyoming several times in the early 70's and I recall very few retro-reflective signs along the way. They stood out and were colorful, which helped break the monotony of driving across Nebraska at night.
Back in the 60s and early 70s, Michigan had a maximum speed limit of 65 by day and 55 at night. They had signs that displayed the 65 speed limit, but at night, when the headlights hit it, it displayed 55. I used to sit in the back seat and watch the sign as we went by and see it change back to 65 as the headlights were no longer affecting it.
That's really clever! Another commenter mentioned something similar Florida DOT does/did on US-1 along the Keys.
I learned something today. Thanks, Rob.
You're welcome, Mark!
There are times when the retroreflective signs dont work at night. Condensation on the sign. I see it sometimes in my area where the signs are barely readable. Took me awhile to figure out why.
The BEST infrastructure is the stuff you don't notice cause it just does it's job. Like the classic saying "a servant is seen but unheard." A good bridge, sign, pipe, wire, pump, whatever is best doing it's job when no one notices.
And road signs are just...there, yeah?
Watching from the UK - you randomly popped up in my recommendations. Fascinating video. The 'retroreflectorization' technology is, of course, the same across Europe but I read a report recently from Finland that there is some concern that modern LED and Xenon headlights may not be 'lighting up' the signs so well as the older lights. This is because they can easily dazzle oncoming cars unless they are very precisely directed down and also little light escapes from the beam pattern meaning less light actually falls on the sign. Can't say I've actually noticed it myself.
Also your reference to 'cat eyes' made me sit up. In the UK we have a well developed system of 'cat's eyes' on our motorways (🇺🇸 highways) with white ones dividing the lanes, red ones at the edge of the road (the left for us) and amber ones near the central reservation (the right for us). Also we have green ones denoting lines that can be crossed like on slip roads (🇺🇸 = ramps). We do have them on some other roads as well.
What a great story about innovation in an engineering approach setting (by engineering approach I mean a system where problems are iteratively tracked downed, diagnosed, and solved towards an end goal).
It’s amazed me for a long time that I could see the reflection of my turn signal in a road sign hundreds of feet away. I had a little bit of understanding of how that was done but now thanks to you, I really understand it completely. This is your best video yet!
You're welcome, James. Glad to hear it!
Turn signals also tend to show up really well on far away road signs even though they're dimmer than headlights since they're angled upwards to be visible to other drivers, rather than downwards to not blind them.
@@galaxyanimal Oh, that makes sense, really interesting. I had noticed that the turn signals were very prominent on the reflection. It's a good thing we can only see our own turn signals because otherwise it would be a cacophony of blinking signs!
Road Guy Rob, you are genuinely fun to listen to. How you present yourself makes me more interested somehow. Great job.
One thing I always find super cool is how the reflectors on the ground will tell if you are on the right side of the road depending on the color I never noticed that until recently
It doesn’t just save energy. It also reduces light pollution.
When driving at night in the rain, I almost _prefer_ an unlit intersection, because when the road is wet, any street lights reflect off of the road surface, obscuring lane markings.
This is enlightening Rob, great one.
Badumtiss
I'm *beaming* with pride! Thank you
Thank Mr Road Guy Rob.
You're welcome, Mr. Vandium Bromide.
Production quality for a relatively small channel is amazing! Godspeed!
Rob has always been the best with his videos dude. Go back and watch them.
I like it when the sign posts are reflective themselves, then I can tell the sign is there even if the sign is blocked by trees
If you shine a laser pointer on a stop sign the entire things glows very brightly!
These hidden technologies are lifesavers! Driving in many poorer countries with their impossible to see Stop/Alto/Pare signs at night really made me appreciate what we take for granted.
Personally as someone who drives for a living, I would like to see overhead highway signs with a green Engineer Grade background with either HIP or Diamond Grade high reflective type lettering. Here they use High Intensity Prismatic grades for both the background and the lettering, and the visibility is awful.
I agree. I also prefer the high contrast between the old glass dots and the non-reflective green background. The "newer" fully reflective signs are illegible when exposed to any significant bright light. I started noticing this while driving on the New York State Thruway (I-87) in the mid-2000s, almost twenty years ago. I don't travel that highway very much anymore.
That's an interesting point. I actually don't mind the whole "text floating in space" look... as long as I can read the text!
@@RoadGuyRob as long as it shows a border... i'm good with the text floating in space... it's like a hologram.
@PrograError that's how the signs are in Canadian national parks. They use a non reflective dark green paint or vinyl with Diamond Grade. Sometimes the lettering and bordering falls off because the paint doesn't allow it to stick very well 😂
@RoadGuyRob in theory, the higher contrast would make visibility much better. Make the lettering a bit thinner so it looks more like letters and not a bright blob as you drive up. I feel like California should update their ancient freeway signs with this, and use Clearview font for extra visibility (and potential controversy among motorists and sign geeks alike).
Yes! I love waking up in the morning and seeing that Rob has posted a new video - then I know I'm about to learn something new. Thanks Rob!
This was absolutely fascinating. A lot of engineering went into something that most people take for granted. So cool!😎
Thank you. Very informative and detailed info. Now, when I see a road sign, you will be on my mind.
Glad to hear! You're welcome.
The funny part about researching these stories is that whatever topic I'm working on, I begin to notice as well while I'm driving.
i was shocked to find out they don't have streetlighting in america, i was driving a major road in florida and it was a real shock to find the only lighting was from headlights.
It depends substantially on where you are, as is the case with most other things in America. Even the same highway can go from well-lit to totally dark in just a few miles.
@@warrior_cat Yes, around here we have so many streetlights that it can be hard to know if your headlights are turned on. I usually have to look at the signs to verify that the lights are on and that it's not just the indicator that's lit.
But, when I get outside the city limits, some of those more rural roads have hardly any streetlights at all. It makes me really appreciate my wife's automatic headlights that activate and deactivate the high beams based on whether it's dark and whether there are other cars in range. Allows me to get full use of the high beams without blinding other drivers.
It depends on the location of the road really. I'm from the UK which is a tiny place, most of the highways here are only lit around big interchanges or near towns and cities.
I suspect the sheer magnitude of our suburbs and rural highway network makes fully illuminating everything very cost-prohibitive. Downtowns (good ones) are well lit at night.
well it really depends on the size of the country and where ya at, Rural v Urban, large country v small country.
tho one benefit of that is the light pollution. You can see the Milky Way... the urbanites can never see that, not unless they go miles outside the city limits...
Found out the other day that there's actually more to this story than retroreflectivity. You touched on it a bit with the distance between the height of the driver and the height of the headlight and how that angle is more pronounced for truck drivers, but that's also one reason why some states tilt the signs down a tad to reduce the angle that the return light has to travel from the sign. Depending on the height of the sign (and how tall the sign itself is), they might still be needing to light the sign because of that angle. That's doubly true for those larger "arrow-per-lane" signs along freeways/expressways.
Very interesting deep dive! Well done!
Another interesting future video idea (if not done before), is how the road signs font has changed over the years.
As far as I can tell, there really have been only 3 in the United States. An original font that evolved into the Highway Gothic we use now. And a copyrighted experimental font called Clearview that has mixed opinions. But yes, I do want to do a story on that. I'm just not sure who to interview, since I'm pretty sure the authors of the Highway Gothic font have long passed on.
@@RoadGuyRob The Clearview designers might be willing to do an interview.
I love Mr. Rob Road!
Love ya too, buddy!
You know what's even better than retro reflective and lighted signs?
Background lit signs. Where the light passes through the graphical element which gives perfect clarity regardless of if your headlights hit the sign or not.
An LCD monitor is a backlit sign that can also change its contents on the fly.
Where i live, we have a few signs like that which adjust based on current state of traffic. Even single point LED signs (less resolution) work wonders.
Also, we've had ONLY retroreflective signs before technology advanced. Not a single "just painted" sign anywhere. At least not official signs.
It's codified into law, every sign NO MATTER it's purpose is retro reflective here. Except the backlit ones with or without dynamic content.
@@RealCadde Backlighting technology actually existed BEFORE retroreflectors. All you need is a translucent sign with lights behind it.
"Make it by the mile and sell it by the inch"
I like that one!
As an artist many years ago, I got my hands on some of the glass beads used in street striping. It was very fine, like sand and I joyfully added it to many of my mixed media works. The in-person effect was wonderful and gave the pieces life as light changed in the room. But then I learned it made photographing the works simply impossible! I had to scrap the idea because photography is key to a working artist.
This is quite possibly your coolest video yet. Great job!
I like your enthusiasm. keep it going!
Will do!
One of the still-unsolved problems is overhead sign readability just after sunset on westbound roads. Because the twilight sky behind the sign is still far brighter than car headlights, the signs appear dark and are completely unreadable. That’s where active lighting still has a place, regardless of how much money or electricity it would save to not have it.
Hi Bob, thank you for your videos. They all are informative and great.
This is actually a really great video! Thank you, I learned a lot.
The road signs in my area glow so bright at night it obscures your ability to see the road in front of you. It’s time to literally tone it down.
Yeah; the road signs on the side of the road glow so brightly on high beams that you can almost get distracted from the actual road itself.
Tangent topic but I think the Victorian government (Australia) was or has introduced photoluminescent paint on roads to make it easier to see the path while driving in night. It’s useful because you don’t have to install obstructive and disruptive (to wildlife) light poles in the middle of nowhere to light up a rural road. It’s powered by the sun from daylight and can last in many conditions. Pretty sure it was rolled out in the Great Alpine Road.
Thanks for the interesting video. I use retroreflective tape on my bicycle wheel rims & cranks, the moving motion reflected back to drivers catches their attention quicker, especially in the peripherals. Another bit of science to help cyclists stay safe at night.
I have a theory that flashing lights actually attract sleepy drivers. It explains why so many cop cars can get hit in the middle of nowhere...it's not just chance.
I'm in awe at the technology which is good for your mood, its why going outside is good for your mood. Because you're in awe at the huge space and possibilities
This was cool. Thanks for sharing with us! :)
I knew about retroreflectors before this, but that demonstration you pulled with the phone light just felt cool.
Talking about energy - this guy is like Adam Savage on Speed! Love it!
The way we do the painting of traffic lanes are interesting too, traffic lanes (at least for the highways that I know of) are supposed to be reflective so you can see them easily at night. How the process I’ve taken part of works is you paint the lines with either the yellow or white paint you need to and after applying paint you throw glass beads over the wet paint and it’s supposed reflect the color of the paint.
This explains an interesting effect I noticed when using an LED headlamp while riding my bike. Normally I have a light mounted on my handlebars, which does a passable job lighting up street signs. With the headlamp, positioned right near my eyes on my helmet, road signs and license plates pop out almost comically, like I'm riding through a video game.
Super well done! No idea street signs had so much engineering behind them.
They actually used the same technology in the 1996 miniseries "Neverwhere."
Peter Capaldi (yes, the future Twelfth Doctor) played the angel Islington, and his costume was essentially a cloak made out of retroreflective material. And in addition to the regular set lighting, there was an additional light on the camera, which made it look like Islington was clothed in light.
I've always been impressed how even my dinky little bike lights can light up road signs when riding at night
It’s always a good day when road guy rob uploads
Love the production quality here! Keep it up!
Fun fact: While LA has a lot of those, San Diego county has had few-lit signs and barely any street lights for most of the century, due to the two observatories - Palomar and Mt Laguna - pushing for strong light pollution laws. Our streets and freeways are pretty dark across the board, especially from the sky. Check it out next time you’re flying into SAN at night!
One advantage of winter here in Finland is that highway signage usually gets checked twice a year, because the speed limits are lowered for winter time. That's why outside of urban areas the speed limit signs would never be too old. They would just discard the ones that had gone bad and replace them with new ones during the next change. There are also variations of signs with a a hinge running in the middle of the sign, from top to bottom. Someone could then go and flip the sign to show a lower or higher speed limit.
On motorways, the signs today are mostly remote controlled or even LED displays rather than just signs. I imagine that the LED displays are specialized to direct the light towards the oncoming car?
Wouldn't the LED just need to light up itself? There's no need to bother with the reflectiveness in that case, it only needs to show up during the brightest sun.
@@PrograError I know that arrow/message boards are required to be dimmed at night; I'd imagine it would be the same for variable speed limit signs.
My workzone installer training glossed over things like that since the company I work for doesn't really use them (it's primarily a flagging company).
@@PrograError Yes but perhaps you still would like the beam to point at a particular direction and not say 40 degree off?
You turned a boring topic into an interesting video. Well done! I learned something new as well!
I've worked on some industrial printers that are used to make these signs and have talked with some of the operators at print shops. The legal requirements for specific traffic colors needs some careful color calibration. Every state and municipality seem to have their own set of requirements that any shop wanting to bid on these jobs has to be able to comply with. Working with these printers was an education.
Keep up the good work Rob
I really like this high tech material, I use reflective tape on my bikes, it's on my backpack, and they put it in shoes too.
I got quite a lot of reflective tape (more than I've really needed!) and love putting it on everything. On that note, slightly unrelated, but I refuse to go outside at night without wearing something reflective - the first time I realised how bad visibility can be at night, I was genuinely shocked, and every little thing to give people an opportunity to react to you helps...
Fantastic! I was wondering about this while driving last night.
I live in Germany since 27 years and haven't seen a single illuminated traffic sign so far. Guess we're really ahead of the US in everything but obesity rate
Videos that are worthwhile. Thank you.
Ansi class 3 vest FINALLY. Thank you!
I'm slowly phasing it in, depending on when I shot the raw material for the video (some are still pre-new vest).
I almost got hit by a car while I was filming in the dark with my old vest (my fault). Thankfully the driver saw me at the last minute. I decided if I'm going to stand near the street, I better wear the proper safety equipment (PPE).
@@RoadGuyRob maybe you can do some mythbusting with the different PPE designs, some from overseas, some with local US standards… like to see if the standards make much sense... vest vs suit. Painted vs retroreflective.
sounds like a perfect PSA video too...
I think it's actually a class 3 vest, since it's got retroreflective stripes on the sleeves. I have to wear a class 2 vest for work, but they make us wear class E pants/gaiters so the whole outfit is class 3 as well.
@@galaxyanimal actually you're right. I missed the sleeves. Nice catch! I kept commenting on his previous videos hoping he would finally get a better vest, happy he has now!
I remember going for a walk one day and finding some broken chunks of the road. I looked at them and saw tons of little glass beads in the road paint. I thought about it for a bit and decided it must be reflecting the light back toward the source, causs I have no clue what other function it was serving. That's how I came to know about the glass beads. It was a pretty fun discovery
CastAR has an augmented reality system that uses glasses with tiny projectors and a retoreeflective surface (say a game board, or a wall of it in a simulator). Your eyes get to focus on what's distant (rather than having the virtual image an inch from your eyeball). And it apparently makes for great D&D style games, where every player sees their own display (think fog of war), even though they're all looking at the same sheet. Pretty clever use of the stuff!
was driving to a party early this year during the dark and discovered these flashing road signs for the very first time.
they damn near caused a crash because i couldn't see anything but them and they were super distracting.
In Allentown, PA, most of the signs are so rusty or sun-bleached, that they're unreadable even during the day.
Nice video! Another disadvantage of using electricity to light up signs is that they will be completely dark whenever the power goes out.
Many, many years ago I noticed something strange. If I was far back from a sign and there was a car closer to the sign, the sign would not be very bright. But if I turned on my high beams, the sign would get much brighter. I originally assumed that my lights were much better than those on the car in front of me. When I learned about retroreflecting surfaces, I realized that it was simply a matter of my lights reflecting straight back to me. Also, my high beams likely did little to brighten the sign for the closer driver as it would not reflect directly back to him.
Text floating in space sounds AWESOME! 😱
Fascinating info and really well done!
Thanks!
This was very illuminating! I learned a lot with this video. Thanks
I'm shining with pride. Thank you.
Very interesting and entertaining as usual. Thanks, Rob!
You're welcome!
I've got a pretty good idea for red light runner detection!!! Keep the inductive loops but stretch the distance to about 500 feet. When the system detects a vehicle moving (fast) that cannot stop, the red light goes to emergency flashing red. When the cars are all stopped, or able to stop, the flashing emergency red turns off. Red fire truck lights that turn on if the system detects a fast-moving vehicle could also warn the drivers who are sitting at the green light. It could warn someone that a vehicle is about to run the red light and avoid a T-bone collision. When the green light illuminates and the flashing red is off, people would know that it is safe to enter the intersection. If they are waiting to go on the green, and the red emergency flashing red lights up, they would know that someone is about to run the red light, and they can stop before entering the intersection----cool!
Road guy rob... you're my hero
Thanks! You're kind
I like that you took the time to try and get the moon with clouds in the background. It creates a certain ambience.
This was awesome! Thank you!!
You're welcome.
This was super educational, great job!
This was fascinating Rob! Thanks!
Let me ask you this, how much of your cars high beam headlights do you really want to be reflected directly back into your eyes? I live in a rural area where when driving at night what you are trying to see are the not very reflective animals, like moose, bear, deer, raccoon, skunk, the occasional cow and many others. To try to avoid these hazards I use my high beams as much as possible and even dim the instrument cluster to aid my night vision. Since they started to replace all the signs with new ones that have this much reflectivity, in some cases it makes the roads less safe. I can understand stop signs being that reflective, you need to see it with enough time to stop, but many other signs I don't need to be able to see from so far away. And it gets even worse when there is a group of signs placed near each other. If I leave my high beams on approaching some of the bigger signs or groups of signs, it is hard to see anything at all beyond the signs and once passed and back into darkness, your night vision takes some time to recover.
I have the same problem, and find the excessive reflection distracting, and like you said, hard to recover from after the signs are gone. I avoid driving at night now. It's a good excuse sometimes...😀
When you need to use the high beams at all times, that's a sign that your days of night driving are drawing to an end.
@@kenofken9458 Yeah why do they put high beam headlights on cars? I would suggest that if you are driving at night and not using your high beams when there is no reason not to, maybe you shouldn't be driving yet. But it is not really the point, even on low beam some of these signs are very bright, and anything that reduces how far you can see in areas with lots of wildlife makes it more dangerous. Even without these signs as a factor people hit animals or other hazards on the road all the time.
@@KevinW-px8is The only place high beams are any use at all to people with functional night vision is on truly dark country roads which will have next to nothing in the way of signage.
If it's deer season, your only safe option is to slow down.
@@kenofken9458 Do you even read what you are responding to? As I said in my first post I live in a very rural area that is very dark and the roads have plenty of signs especially the yellow ones that I find the most offensive. They are used to warn of curves and other such hazards of which there are many on the roads I drive on, and on these types of roads the signs are generally closer to the road (shoulder mounted) than in other locations. I don't know where you get your ideas, but high beams aren't used to help you see better at night but to see farther, giving you more time to react to roadway hazards. I have no idea what you mean by deer season, and our deer seem unaware of it as well, and will run out in front of you year round. Texas A&M University did a study of the effect of road sign reflectivity (that didn't even use the worst offending yellow signs) and in its conclusion found that:
Based on the findings from this study, there is evidence that shoulder-mounted signs can be too bright in rural areas with low or no visual complexity. While there was no measured reduction in legibility, there was a large reduction in the overall ability to detect potentially hazardous objects near the roadway. In other words, the detection distances were shorter when signs were within 200 ft of the targets. More specifically, the average detection distance of the three objects with no sign was 371 ft. When there was a sign with Type III material, the detection distance decreased to about 302 ft. When the sign sheeting was Type XI material, the detection distance decreased even more to 258 ft.
This is so interesting.
Fun video learn a lot, Rob keep up the good work
this is crazy. i never knew that this was boiled down to a science. very interesting vid. as a kid i wondered why signs werent lit up at night
You can get a 2D version of the retroreflector if you put two wall mirrors at 90 degrees to each other. No matter where you stand, the middle of your face will be right where the two mirrors meet. This setup is common in clothing stores.
“One of the losers in terms of technology are these old-school backlit street signs”. I invite you to Michigan, my friend. We simply MUST have backlit “only”, “one-way”, “no left turn”, etc signs in traffic signal setups.
I think that it's funny that California has them, but I'm a few hours from the Canadian border where we get over 16 hours worth of darkness during the night, and we have never had lit signs like that. Or at least not in the decades that I've been living here.
If folks know where to look, those lighted street signs can probably be bought when they're taken out of service. Around here, you can buy used street signs to hang in your room if you want to as a way of recouping some of the cost of the signs.
In Tempe, AZ, all the road name signs on the major roads are backlit in fancy sign holders.
I need to come to Michigan for a variety of reasons. Is there any particular month that isn't freezing and/or skeeter bites (they love to get me!)?
@@RoadGuyRob I gotta tell ya, my motto is “you can always layer up, but you can’t always layer down”… I love the cold and snow. But to answer your question, usually the autumn and spring months (September/October, and March/April) are pretty neutral in the temperature and mosquito departments.
In Las Vegas, NV, we use the backlit signs on traffic poles for the street names on signaled intersections, like those ones from CA you showed. Some of those have been replaced by thinner backlight signs, which I assume are using LEDs for the backlighting, especially ones where they recently replaced entire traffic poles and their assemblies, but most of them are still those California style ones. North Las Vegas, does not use the backlighted street signs on a lot of their signaled intersections.
Glass-bead reflectorization was used for license plates starting with Georgia in 1941, but they only worked well when the plates were brand new. After awhile the rough surface of the beads on the surface of the paint got dirty and lost reflectivity. When 3M began producing Scotchlite reflective sheeting by the late 1960s, that became the way license plates attained their current appearance.
Rob in my neighborhood? Let’s go
I live right around the corner. Well, 40 minutes around the corner.
Love this channel. Keep up the great work!
I remember in AZ signs that would show one speed limit in day and another speed at night
I live in Phoenix, and every time I drive to California for something I still see those cat eye reflectors on their signs in random places. So weird that they haven't gone through and replaced all their signage in that long! Phoenix, well ADOT, replaces their songs anytime there's regulation change. Like now they've taken all the signs across the valley that are light up or they had lights underneath them or above them to eliminate the sign at night, those all disappeared probably a decade ago or so with the highly reflective signs. He was like a miracle the first time I drove on the highway or freeway without having those signs lit up and as I'm driving it's like it's lit up just for me and me alone. They'll clear from other people's headlights or anything it was the craziest thing I'd ever seen! Also with ADOT throughout some very particular about cleaning up any graffiti or anything and they have a 24 hours or less rule that any graffiti reported or seen is eliminated within 24 hours. And they are sure as shit on it! Meanwhile you go to California and it just feels like a dump. All the freeways are completely encased in graffiti and it looks so bad there. And even people get up on the overhead signs on the walkways catwalks and spray paint on top of the signs for the roadway. But I guess crap like that happens whenever you're a blue state and you let everybody get away with everything and I'll just let them steal everything and leave the store we won't prosecute them. I would hate my life so badly if I lived in California! The only good things I've come out of that is in and out burger and a handful of movies