MINNEAPOLIS — If you were driving on the highways around Christmas, you probably noticed it was rainy and dark.
The darkness made many question their eyesight because the road markings were difficult to see.
Roadwork, just like any other project, is a work in progress.
"As we fixed one problem, we had another come up," said Ethan Peterson who works as a pavement markings and crashworthiness engineer at MnDOT.
Peterson said the hard-to-see markings came from trying to solve another problem.
"We tend to recess our pavement markings so we kind of create a trough for the water to go into," Peterson said. "Recessing came from the need to protect our pavement markings from snow plows."
Pavement markings are filled with reflective materials, which are just glass beads that are designed to refract car headlights at just the right angle to have them shine back at the driver. Now add water to the trough the markings sit on, then the markings have a harder time doing their job.
"The problem with wet weather, when water covers that is that you add another media, another substance that the light has to refract through," Peterson said. "So it changes the path of the light and it doesn't hit your eyes like it should. It disperses and it goes in a different direction, and you just lose the optic altogether."
The fix involves bigger and better beads that reflect better through water too, called wet-reflective materials.
Peterson said the replacement work has begun but is happening only when a road needs to be resurfaced.
"If you've been driving some of our newly resurfaced roadways you'll probably notice that the pavement markings are a lot brighter, at least I am," he said. "And I think throughout the state people are too."
MnDOT maintains about 13,000 miles of roads but that's only about 10 percent of all the roads in Minnesota. MnDOT said it is looking to replace the pavement markings in its jurisdiction as it resurfaces roads in the next five to 10 years.
Other roads are under the jurisdiction of different counties and cities.
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