BAARRP BAARRP BAARRP BAARRP

The M5 south of the river has those audible lane markings. In fact, it was the state Main Roads Department’s original test site for that invention. The first version was a ribbed metal strip, laid under the roadside lane marker and then painted white. When your tire hit the strip it made a long droning BAARRP to wake up a drifting driver. Worked great (damn near shit myself the first time I hit one) but cost a ton. The final version, which now gets used everywhere, not just on the edge markers but even on the dashed lane dividers, is just paint. They paint the white line then impress a herringbone pattern into I guess the gooey mixture of paint and ground up rubber, leaving a pattern of little bricks the size of your fingertip. Still makes a good BAARRP, but the whole thing is laid out by one machine.

This morning as I take the exit for work I get the interrupted tone as I cross the dotted lane markers. This got me thinking, the inventor probably took inspiration from aircraft cockpit alarms. This regular pattern of dots, stamped out by a wheel in the wet paint-goop makes a good loud alarm tone, kinda like that one iPhone alarm sound that you select when you really can’t sleep in. But what if it /wasn’t/ regular? Could you encode music in it? Speech?

This is my thing. My whole job is product prototyping. I’m thinking about this idea all the way from the exit until I get to the lab. I have a robot chassis or three, I have plenty of spare gps receivers. Magnetic drill. Line following sensors. What if I took the regular pattern of dots and *removed* some, to generate a pulse-code-modulated wave form, like how PC games in the 90s would try to squeeze recognizable audio out of the shitty square wave beeper on your computer, back before “sound cards” were a thing? I run off a couple of meters of fake lane marker on the belt printer, and while that prints I cobble together some software. Yeah, it doesn’t bloody work. Takes a week or so of print-a-road-marker-overnight, and then fuck-it-up-in-the-morning until I get a line follower, a line /eater/ if you will, that can subtractively encode a WAV file into the lane marker.

I work late, past sunset. On the way home I pull into the emergency stopping bay a klik before my exit. I lift the Eater Of Lines out of the truck and stash it in the long grass. It’s set to activate at 3am, follow and selectively eat a few hundred meters of line, then go off into the weeds again. At the speed limit in that area your tires cover around thirty meters of road each second.

Next morning I get on the freeway heading south, but take the very next exit and then loop around and get back on, heading home. It actually takes an effort of will to deliberately run off the road at 100km/hr. BAARRP BAARP BAA–TERRAIN TERRAIN TERRAIN PULL UP PULL UP PULL UP–RRP BAARRP BAARRP. Fuck me, it works!

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