China Is Using Lasers On Roads To Solve A Deadly Driving Problem

Anyone who has tackled a marathon late-night drive knows that terrifying moment when the eyelids suddenly feel like lead. The road stretches on into blackness and the dotted lane lines blur together. That's highway hypnosis setting in. Although there are things like texting and car accessories that can make driving dangerous, highway hypnosis is a serious hazard and can quickly lead to collisions once it sets in. It's hard to beat even when you chug an energy drink or roll down the window for a blast of cold air. What if you could make the drive more stimulating, though?

That's the question officials in China have pondered recently, and now they've decided to skip subtle warnings to drivers and go full sci-fi spectacle instead. Along stretches of the country's nearly 1,000-mile Qingdao-Yinchuan Expressway, overhead platforms are now fitted with high-powered, colorful laser projectors. When the night finally turns pitch black, the system fires a sequence of intensely colorful light beams directly across the sky above the traveling vehicles.

The resulting scene looks less like a dull remote highway and more like a rave or a live-action round of the Rainbow Road level in "Mario Kart." Flashing ribbons of neon red, cyan, and electric green streak overhead, illuminating the road ahead in pulsating waves. The goal there is aggressive sensory interruption; this burst of visuals should shatter the boring darkness of the drive and shock tired brains back into gear so fatigued drivers don't drift off. China is often soaring to new heights with technology, like making a supercomputer work without a GPU, but this particular experiment is a curious step.

Blasting ultra-bright lasers across a highway sounds like the kind of thing warranting an instant lawsuit, but engineers made sure the lasers are actually positioned in a way that'll avoid disaster. So instead of pointing the beams directly at windshields, China's road crews mounted the projectors up on existing steel sign platforms and angled the lasers upward into the sky. This creates an overhead display, as seen in a TikTok video.

The science behind this unique experiment seems to hinge on breaking the sensory deprivation that can cause highway hypnosis. How? Because staring at an unchanging asphalt void for three hours straight practically lulls the brain into standby mode. Perhaps Chinese authorities think that these pulses of atmospheric lighting can trigger a quick jolt of alertness in drivers, which then causes your brain to focus and engage in taking in this new information.

It's important to note that China's road authorities are not turning every highway and road into a permanent light show. This laser setup is currently only in notorious danger zones, like long straightaways where drivers are most prone to zoning out or crashing. And the lasers are only turned on intermittently; this way the visuals stay startling and novel, so your brain doesn't get too used to seeing them and start tuning them out, too.

While dashcam clips of the futuristic neon expressway look undeniably cool, advocates for traffic safety aren't sold on it actually helping drivers. The elephant in the room is a glaring lack of hard, empirical crash data proving that the lasers actually save lives over time. Whether these pulsating, colorful lasers can actually lower the number of late-at-night collisions is still unproven by independent peer-reviewed studies.

One of the biggest criticisms is that the lasers might introduce an entirely new hazard: distracting drivers. A disoriented, sleepy driver suddenly confronted by bright magenta streaks might hit the brakes in a panic or end up fixating on the sky instead of the semi-truck in front of them. Social media users have listed concerns about the risks to motorists with issues like astigmatism and epilepsy, along with the lasers just being a distraction in general.

Until metrics from comprehensive studies get published detailing that this colorful experiment does actually reduce fatal wrecks, the project sits in an awkward gray area between innovation and reckless gimmick. Creativity is often a good way to find a functional solution to problems, especially one that affects drivers around the globe. However, turning public transit arteries into an open-air laser show might end up solving one problem only to replace it with another. It's one of the reasons China is bringing back physical controls for new cars.