RoadPrintz Robotic Road Painting

Our story RoadPrintz Inc.·Monday, February 11, 2019· WHAT is all this about? I’m Sam, the CEO of RoadPrintz. I’m a businessman and serve on my city’s Transportation Advisory Council. In May 2017, the City of Cleveland Heights was poised to resurface Noble Rd, a four-lane street with a 50-foot curb bed and nowhere near the daily traffic to justify itself in that form. The plan was to put it on a “road-diet” with a shared center turning lane, one through-traffic lane in each direction, a four foot wide diagonally striped buffer next to each separating it from the new five foot wide bike lanes. It would be the first leg of the proposed “Eastside Greenway” project. Just before groundbreaking, we learned that the road diet had been canceled. Why? Because the paint scheme was too expensive. All those left turn arrows needed for the shared center lane. All those diagonal stripes, all those bike symbols would add up to cost an extra $30,000 for the two mile project. This on a $2.1 million project. Barely even a rounding error! But, as it turned out, it wasn’t the cost of the original paint scheme that killed the diet: it was the cost of annual repainting maintenance. Yes, all that paint work would be done “by hand.” By which they meant, using stencils. Stencils have worked well for 40,000 years, roughly since the week after paint was first invented. And while there are machines to lay down long lines, like center lines and lane markers, no one had automated the hand stenciling of arrows, or even of diagonal striping. I suggested that we call in “the guy with the truck; the one who can just paint those diagonals and arrows.” The City Public Works guys looked at me like I had two heads. “Good luck with that! There is no guy, there is no truck.” So I set out to find him, the guy with the truck. And I couldn’t. Not in the US, not in Canada, not even in Europe or Australia. So, the repaving project got done, but we were stuck with the same awful four-lane highway. Eventually, when I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I had to invent a system, to become “the guy with the truck!” Now we’re deep in the R&D needed to bring it all to fruition. We’ve gotten some fantastic support so far, and we’re raising funds to get to a prototype stage. Stay tuned.