Posted on 12/19/2022 6:08:45 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Ed Baiden, who heads PPG’s traffic solution business, calls it “the beauty of our system in the U.S.” that each state has its own shade of yellow paint for road markings.
“There’s a Kentucky yellow, a Pennsylvania yellow, an Iowa yellow,” Mr. Baiden said.
And while the federal highway administration has spent years mulling a change in the width of those yellow stripes from a minimum of 4 inches to 6 inches, 24 states have already adopted the wider standard. And the rest are headed in that direction.
And that means PPG gets to sell a lot more insert-state-here yellow in the coming years.
Here’s a back of the napkin calculation: it takes about 18 gallons of paint to stripe a mile of road using 4-inch-wide markings. PPG estimates there are 8.8 million lane miles in the U.S.
An extra two inches goes a long way when the canvas is the entire country.
The Downtown-based paint and coatings maker is relatively new to the road paint game. It launched a traffic solutions business in January 2021, a month after acquiring North Carolina-based Ennis-Flint Inc. which brought that expertise in house.
The business unit has 1,300 employees and about 22 manufacturing facilities, with most of its business focused in the U.S.
It’s not just the color that separates Maine from Mississippi. In addition to paint, PPG also makes thermoplastic markings, which are extruded from a specialized truck and applied to the ground. That’s more popular in the Southern states where snowplows aren’t scraping the road.
States in the North tend to use paint.
Striping roads is a seasonable business, Mr. Baiden said. The pavement can’t be cold or wet when new paint or thermoplastic is applied.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
That explains Michigan. As I saw on Google Maps street view, they're starting to paint their roads with fatter yellow stripes.
Some states are more yellow than others depending on their politics.
Different custom yellow paints means competition is made difficult when buying paint.
I would hope other paint producers could duplicate the characteristics.
Insert Dan Rather quote here.
Congress must end this nonsense! In their own inimitable way.
Things I learned from a video documentary:
A woman came up with the idea, and painted a white line down the middle of her street to give some order to traffic and stop accidents and arguments.
The broken white line was originally adopted to save on paint.
How many shades of yellow are there...2?
‘ “When I travel around the country and I talk to customers, that’s the number one product they ask for: a product that can be applied in much colder temperatures or wet conditions,” he said. “That’s something we’re actively looking at.”’
Hang on, I thought global warming was supposed to be making things hotter? Oh, that is why we have to call it climate change because it is not necessarily getting hotter but we have to score people.
Why? Because “self driving” cars had trouble seeing the narrow ones.
50 shades of yellow
Yup!
I can always tell when a drunk is driving by, especially late at night, just by listening!
Thunk, thunk, thunk...silence...thunk...silence...thunk, thunk...silence...thunk...silence...thunk, think, thunk.
That’s what is implied further down in the article beyond the excerpt.
At first, I thought, why would the feds want to mandate the wider stripes? Only Stevie Wonder could miss the 4-inch stripes they have in states like Montana and Idaho.
Then I read about the self-driving cars.
Next they will be mandated to paint rainbow stripes.
I’ve noticed here in Kentucky that the country roads have different lines depending on the width of the road.
A full-sized road has lines in the middle and solid white lines on the edges.
A narrower road has lines in the middle but no white lines on the side.
If the road becomes really narrow, to where it’s more of a lane than a road, it doesn’t have any lines at all.
And signs that tell you the name of this or that little country road? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Cool story - thanks for sharing.
That 50 different hues of yellow is primarily a way to create more business for those paint companies. Creating regulations for painting the road lines is highly important but also sounds highly boring.
Or is it one shade of yellow with 50 different names?
The nice thing about standards is there’s so many of them.
“The nice thing about standards is there’s so many of them.”
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Very clever!
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