Potential savings in lives & money
Black ice is a major danger in most of the temperate zone, this won't prevent it (there are ways to prevent it using heat pipes, commonly in use in certain road sections in Germany & Sweden,) but any warning is helpful.
Durability shouldn't be an issue, as durable road paint clear top covers are available if nothing else.
Most luminescent materials will recharge even on cloudy days, and they will recharge with traffic from headlights (albeit not as well.)
Even with more frequent repainting, the material has distinct cost and reliability advantages over streetlights in lower traffic zones, and is a great assistance in high traffic zones if power to lights goes out...like it did last weekend over he US East coast.
A the US rebuilds thousands of bridges, installation of such markings, and/or heat pipe geothermal warming of bridge decks should be considered strongly simply from a safety stand point.
Temperature detection for surfaces could have been included in vehicle design (along with a lot of other assistance technology,) but like seat belts in the 1950's car manufacturers resist the idea of incorporating safety features (though that is changing these days.)
Equipment maintenance is increasingly important to safety as roads get heavier traffic and vehicles get increasingly automated. The vehicles of the future are very likely to include maintenance as part of the purchase/lease costs, simply because at some point the cars will refuse to run if they have equipment problems...just as many cars will stop if you miss payments today.
The more highly automated the vehicles become, the safer the roads become, and the higher the number of vehicles you can operate safely at higher speeds.
For instance, automated vehicles which communicate and act as 'trains' can run at least 10x closer to each other safely than manually controlled vehicles, this means 140,000 vehicles per lane per hour instead of 14,000 and no stop&go; traffic which means far fewer accidents and more predictable travel times.
Automated vehicles eliminate drunk drivers, drivers who are tired, highway hypnosis, inattention and other driver-related issues...they can even avoid and report potholes permitting maintenance to repair damage before it becomes a major danger.
Imagine using your 2 hour commute to eat breakfast & catch up on news, paperwork, sleep or phone calls, without having to pay any attention to to the car or road.
Imagine the safety advantages of people leaving bars even with less than the maximum alcohol in their systems (even below legal limits your reflexes and eyesight are adversely affected, your emotional stability is lessened, and your overall capabilities diminished,) being able to crawl into your car and start for home and pass out or sleep or whatever.
We've been technically capable of doing much of this for over 30 years, and it becomes cheaper every day, such systems added to current vehicles would add between 5-15% to vehicle costs, but decrease accident rates by 95% or more.
These systems can be designed into new vehicles (many new vehicles already have parts of such systems designed in,) and could be retro-fitted to older vehicles at moderate cost.
Even using the systems to run vehicles in traffic at their current average spacing (which is usually 2x-3x closer than what is safe) would increase safety greatly, and decrease average travel times (since manual drivers changing lanes to the 'faster' lane, speeding up excessively rather than maintaining the average speed and accidents are the major causes of stop & go traffic which decrease fuel efficiency and travel time greatly.)
