There are a variety of tactics used on our roads to help drivers read their surroundings and make the best driving decisions they can. Here at Hi-Way Services, we have three decades of experience as a road marking contractor, and installing road studs – colloquially known as “cat’s eyes” – is a key part of the service we provide to help keep roads maintained and safe to use.
Road studs are used to mark the boundaries of roads and guide drivers, and while they aren’t necessarily reflective in every case, they are usually most helpful at night. While it may seem alien to anyone who spends much of their time in an urban area, a large proportion of our road network – from motorways to country lanes – isn’t illuminated by street lamps, making other visual cues extremely important for night driving.
When were Cat’s Eye road studs first installed?
Ever since the motorcar was invented, people have been coming up with ways to make driving safer and more accessible, and cat’s eye reflectors have been part of our roads to one extent or another for nearly one hundred years.
The story of their invention may have become slightly apocryphal since that time, but it began in 1934 with British inventor Percy Shaw. In one version of the story, he came up with the idea when tram lines were removed from a local road, and he realised he had been using their reflectivity to judge where the sides of the road were at night.
The other (and somewhat more romantic) iteration is that Percy only narrowly avoided a crash after a cat flashed its eyes at him from across the road. Still, whatever their origin, reflective road studs soon became ubiquitous, and their invention earned Percy an OBE.
How do Cat’s Eye reflectors function?
The basic design of cat’s eye road studs is something that broadly applies, with a few variations, across many different kinds of road studs, and it’s one that has hardly changed since Percy Shaw had his bright idea back in the 1930s.
Cat’s eyes functionality and design are built around a domed glass tube known as a ‘retroreflector’, which bounces light back to its source (which will in the vast majority of cases be vehicle headlights). This tube is surrounded by springy and flexible rubber, and placed in a cast-iron casing.
The rubber that houses the retroreflector tubes serves multiple purposes. Firstly, it holds the reflective elements of a cat’s eye above ground so they are visible to drivers, and secondly, their flexibility means that the road studs are pushed into the ground when people drive over them.
This ensures that tyres aren’t damaged, but it also serves a different purpose. In a clever piece of design, every time the tubes are pushed down, a brush wipes away any dirt so they remain bright and reflective. In updated patents for road studs, a small reservoir of collected rainwater is sprayed over the cat’s eye to make it even cleaner.
All these more delicate features are protected by the road stud’s cast iron wrapping, which is fixed into the road and can support the weight of passing cars.
How do Cat’s Eye road studs keep drivers safe?
Reflective road studs are one of the most important tools in making sure that drivers do not run off the road in poor lighting conditions. The shining lights allow motorists to easily recognise corners, edges and curves in the road, helping them to judge their surroundings and make the safest decisions.
This is extremely important, as many roads become pitch black at night, and headlights do not provide enough clarity, even at full beam, to see everything around you. Road studs can also act as lane markers and highlight pedestrian crossings, with different colours (red, white, green and amber) having different meanings in the UK:
- White reflectors are used to inform drivers of centre lines and lane markings.
- Amber and red markings run across areas such as the edge of a road to indicate these lines should not be crossed.
- Green denotes areas where there are lines but they can be crossed, such as slip roads on a motorway.
Alongside the visual cues, road studs also provide warnings to drivers if they are drifting too far in the lane by creating an audio and tactile effect that can be felt and heard in the car. They are also long-lasting and do not require any energy to run, relying either on reflective surfaces or solar power.
If you would like to find out more about how Hi-Way Services can assist you in a road maintenance project, whether that’s installing cat’s eyes or applying road markings, don’t hesitate to get in touch today.
