An investment in Traffic Safety

In modern infrastructure, road markings are a fundamental contributor to road safety and driver comfort. Markings that are well-designed, accurately applied and durable,  help people get to where they want to go faster as well as safer!

To actually lower the n u m b e r of traffic accidents, road markings are one of the key tools to improve highway efficiency and safety, by ensuring effective traffic segregation as well as providing guidance, instructions, warnings and prohibitions.

The same applies to many other areas of the complex infrastructure that keeps the wheels of society rolling – airports, harbours, tunnels, car parks, cycle paths and everywhere in which flows of traffic need to be kept under control to keep people safe and to prevent the snarl-ups that are an all-round waste of time and money.

The safety imperative

Probably the most important feature of such line markings is the ability to reflect light from the vehicle back to the driver (“retro-reflectivity”) so that the markings can be seen easily under all kinds of conditions.

Other crucial properties include luminance (“brightness”) and skid resistance – and then there’s the whole issue of effective service life, and the maintenance costs and return on-investment perspectives involved.

Rumble effect –  thinking in patterns

One of the most effective ways to increase the retro-reflectivity of road markings is to boost the efficacy of the glass-bead component by laying the markings in non-continuous patterns appropriate to each context.

Structured and profiled thermoplastic road markings have the major advantage of featuring large numbers of vertical or near-vertical surfaces facing all different directions. They are therefore highly reflective from virtually any angle and in virtually all conditions.

Profiled thermoplastic road markings also have a big effect when the wheels of any vehicle come into contact with appropriately designed dots, lines and patterns. These result in a warning rumble, along with vibration throughout the vehicle. This alerts the driver to any divergence from the marked lanes.

Borum in India –  upgrading the relationship

Denmark based Borum, a leading provider of high quality line marking technology and equipment has supplied machines to some of the important road marking companies in India. However, with the increasing traffic density, the higher focus on road safety and general high investment in infrastructure both on local and on state level the Indian market is expected  to become one of the most important markets for Borum in the years to come.

Fast and efficient machines will be necessary in order to prevent prolonged shut-downs of major roads. Furthermore, more flexible marking equipment like the extrusion type is expected to be introduced as road marking companies will look for equipment help shift between line types without having to shift between sizes of marking equipment.