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Painting the country yellow: PPG mixes a different shade of road paint for each state in the union
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ^ | December 19, 2022 | Anya Litvak

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 ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Local News; Outdoors; Travel
KEYWORDS: lanemarkings; pennsylvania; pittsburgh; ppg
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To: gr8eman

How many shades of yellow are there...2?
= = =

About 535.


41 posted on 12/19/2022 11:04:36 AM PST by Scrambler Bob
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To: discostu

There is Pee yellow, curb yellow, and banana.


42 posted on 12/19/2022 11:42:17 AM PST by gr8eman (Abortion! It's just a murderous ghoul thing!)
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To: gr8eman

Only if you’re a man, and not a DOT employee. Having bought my wife craft markers, and having driven over the “test strip block” in Tucson I know there’s a LOT more.


43 posted on 12/19/2022 11:45:45 AM PST by discostu (like a dog being shown a card trick)
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To: Sequoyah101

Many DOTs seem to function as a jobs program for guys named Bubba.


44 posted on 12/19/2022 12:46:23 PM PST by brianl703
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To: libertylover

Here in Virginia, VDOT won’t paint center lines down a road until it has more than 3000 vehicles per day.


45 posted on 12/19/2022 12:47:54 PM PST by brianl703
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To: jeffc

RJ45 is a standard. But the term is erroneously used to refer to an 8P8C modular connector.

Somewhere in the FCC regulations is a definition of what exactly an RJ45 is, which is a jack for a leased data line from the telephone company.

At one point you could call the phone company and tell them that you need a leased line with an RJ45 and that told the telephone company everything they needed to know to install a circuit and jack compatible with your equipment.

The “RJ” in RJ45 stands for “Registered Jack” and there is a whole series of them, all not only specifying the connector to be used but the arrangement of circuits and the type of circuits to be used with them.

For example, an RJ21X defines a 50 pin micro-ribbon connector with up to 25 analog (POTS) lines on it.

So, technically speaking and perhaps being a little pedantic, an 8P8C modular connector used with ethernet is NOT an RJ45.


46 posted on 12/19/2022 12:58:46 PM PST by brianl703
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To: mykroar

One of my favorite movies! :-)


47 posted on 12/19/2022 2:10:51 PM PST by pax_et_bonum (God is good, He loves us, and He is always with us.)
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