If you have read any of my previous write-ups, you will know that this is a short series of inventions I have literally dreamt-up.
One of my dream/inventions was based on experiences driving at night. The glare of oncoming vehicle’s headlights, and the inability to see the road ahead as you must use low-beam when there are other cars coming towards you.
The solution is simple, and yet proves more difficult as you read on. Simply have cars no longer require headlights. By making the road ahead visible in the dark would render the requirement for headlights unnecessary.
If there were a small amount of radioactive material with an enormously long half-life added to the bitumen (or as it is called in my country, tarseal), then at night the roads would glow much as an analogue watch glows at night. The roads would be charged up during the daytime.
The dream/invention then moved on to the testing of the safety of radioactive roadways. Supposing the half-life of the radioactive isotope used (bearing in mind that I have no in-depth knowledge on chemistry or radioactive materials, other than what I have read, dreamt or made up) were 10-years (extremely short, but used as an example, usually half-lives are measured in the millions of years). That would mean that every 10 years, half of the radioactive material will release protons which fly out at high speed and damage any atoms they hit. By working in the laws of probability and a bit of statistical data, you could calculate the probability of a vehicle being bombarded with radiation and therefore the driver suffering. Lead-lined vehicles springs to mind here.
Further to this article you should consider the ability to remove high volumes of unwanted roading material. When a section of highway is removed, what comes of the piles of glowing detris? Perhaps a recycling program, or scoop it up into 44-gallon drums and dump it into the ocean where it will be out of sight, out of mind until a couple of generations from now our grandchildren discover them leaking and polluting their oceans. By then we would have got away with it.