Lateral thinking in The Netherlands about the roads of the future

摘要

The Dutch have been consistently in the vanguard when it comes to road control, as anyone can tell while waiting at the 'hip-hop' traffic lights filtering cars evenly onto the motorway around Rotterdam. Over half the Netherlands' motorways have control systems, information displays and ramp metering. On the Rotterdam ring you can be re-directed across lanes by gantry-mounted illuminated lane panels located every 500m, or by dynamic information displays. These are automated, connected to road bed detectors monitoring vehicles types, speeds and traffic density. But the Netherlands is looking far beyond this first generation of information systems, first introduced in the mid-1980s. In the future Dutch road surfaces may guide you with pulsing light waves along lane markers, controlling 'zipping' speed to fuse traffic streams at higher speeds. Lane markings may shift around according to traffic levels, creating four lanes instead of three during peak hours, reversing flow or perhaps directing traffic around obstacles such as accidents and road works.