Road

This week is UN Road Safety Week, which highlights road traffic deaths and injuries and focuses on ways to reduce them. This year the week is headlined by the #SlowDown campaign, which is part of a plan to reduce road fatalities by 50 percent before 2020. Its suggestion? Lower speed limits.

French Minister Ségolène Royal has today officially launched a kilometer long solar road project in Normandy. Nearly 3,000 Wattway panels are expected to produce an average of 767 kWh of electricity per day, peaking in summer months to as much as 1,500 kWh.

Researchers have developed a process that uses pig manure as a low-cost replacement for petroleum in the production of road asphalt. In searching for bio alternatives, the group discovered that swine waste is especially rich in oils very similar to petroleum suited for asphalt production.

Melbourne folk do love their coffee, and one day the beverage mightn't be just pepping them up for a day's work. Swinburne University researchers have scoured the campus' cafes for coffee grounds and used them as part of the mix for a more sustainable road material. ​​

Ford has taken to solving the problem of potholes by creating a suspension system that reads the road and prepares the car's dampers for the hit, making for a smooth ride in the cabin.

Startup Addibots is looking to help cut the man hours required to maintain our cities, wheeling out a roving 3D printing robot it imagines will scoot around town mending dodgy road surfaces.

Besides the fact that road salt gets all over our cars and clothing, it also has to be reapplied throughout the winter, harming the environment in the process. If a new type of asphalt reaches production, however, salt-spreading may become a thing of the past.​

Technology to power electric vehicles wirelessly from under the road surface is about to be trialed in the UK. Highways England has announced that it plans to carry out off-road (test track) trials with a view to carrying out subsequent on-road trials. The technology would increase the range of EVs.

Asphalt covers more than 94 percent of paved streets in the US, but have we gone down the wrong road with our choice of building material? A Dutch firm has unveiled plans for roads made from plastic, claiming they would last longer and cut construction and maintenance time.

Jaguar Land Rover claims that potholes cause £2.8 billion (US$4.3 billion) worth of damage every year in Britain alone. Now the car company is developing the Pothole Alert system, which can not only identify the location and severity of potholes, but can also warn other vehicles about them.

Imagine taking a road trip from the UK to the US, via Russia. According to The Siberian Times, this might soon be possible.

The world's first solar bike path is set to open in the Netherlands next Wednesday. The SolaRoad will run through Amsterdam's northern suburb of Krommenie and will feature concrete slabs embedded with solar panels to convert energy from the sun into electricity for the grid.