3M tech making it easier for drivers to see on dark, rainy roads

When JC Ojeda and Marlene Lopez Ibarra pitch products to prospective customers, they first talk about their own families — and bringing them home safely.

The technical specifications of 3M’s reflective pavement markings can wait.

“When I see what we’re doing on the road, when I see that we’re saving families, when I see the technology ... this is the business that I want to work in,” said Lopez Ibarra, global director for pavement markings at 3M.

The Maplewood-based company best known for Scotch tape, respirators and Post-it Notes has long played a role in transportation safety. 3M pioneered the reflective sheeting used on road signs and license plates almost a century ago.

Today, as road markings need to accommodate cameras on cars, and transportation departments continue to work toward fewer fatalities, 3M sees an opening to again revolutionize highway safety, this time by illuminating dark and rainy roads.

The safety gains by using 3M’s highly reflective road tapes and ceramic bead “elements” used in road paint are backed up by third-party studies, and inside an interactive theater on 3M’s campus, the difference in the company’s yellow and white road markings is stark.

“3M is the only company in the world that offers continuous wet retroreflectivity,” meaning water doesn’t reduce visibility, said application engineer Ojeda. “The competitors cannot make that, and that’s why our yellow is more yellow, and the white is still white.”

A federal study found a 46% reduction in run-off-road crashes and a 41% reduction in crashes with injury on multi-lane roads when 3M’s wet reflective pavement markings were used.

A Texas A&M study found 3M’s pavement marking tape is three times brighter and cuts rainy night fatalities in half. One version of it can be applied temporarily for construction projects without leaving “ghost lines” behind, it noted.

But the 3M products are top-shelf offerings in a cost-conscious industry. Competitors can sell their road coatings for a fraction of the high-performing tape. Compared with the traditional thermoplastic paints, 3M tapes cost four times as much per mile.

“While preformed tapes often display the longest service lives of any material on the market, they are extremely expensive and time-consuming to install compared to most other materials,” according to a Texas Transportation Institute review.

3M got into the road safety business in the 1930s by inventing a reflective sheeting called Scotchlite. Tiny glass beads help retroreflect light back to drivers to make signs visible from farther away.

The first Scotchlite-enhanced stop sign went up in Minneapolis in 1939. Now reflective signs and license plates, often made with 3M technology, are the standard.

“We have really good market share on the signing materials,” said Stacy Davis, vice president of transportation safety at 3M.

The pavement markings business has yet to conquer the market in the same way, as anyone who drives rainy highways at night can attest. A lot has to do with the cost comparisons.

Part of that is the cost. Quality comes at a price, however, and it takes some work to convince agencies why more taxpayer money upfront will result in savings — and better safety — over the long term. 3M tapes are expected to last four to eight years compared with the average two-year lifespan of thermoplastic markings, according to a Texas A&M study.

“Getting that cost calculator out there and making sure that message is clearly understood by our customers is absolutely critical,” said Davis. “You’re going to replace the material less frequently, so it becomes more cost-effective to use our materials to get a better result.

“There’s great growth opportunity,” Davis added, to continue rolling out reflective tapes and ceramic beads on roads around the world.

Grand View Research pegs the road markings market at $5.8 billion globally and about $1 billion in the U.S. It should grow faster than inflation at about 6% per year through 2030.

While 3M CEO Bill Brown has put an early emphasis on innovating new products, he also wants the company to get better at selling what it already makes. 3M’s sales force was overhauled in recent years as part of a massive corporate restructuring.

With about 300 employees working on transportation safety at 3M, Davis said many are tasked with evangelizing the company’s offerings.

“We’re making sure that the departments of transportation really understand that these materials are available,” she said.

Sometimes it just takes a random encounter, like a FedEx executive sitting by a 3M employee on a plane and talking about road safety, to realize there is ample support for safer roads.

“I cannot tell you the number of people, when I tell them I’m in the pavement marking business, ask: ‘Can you please tell me how I get my state, federal, local governments to put your tape in this intersection, on this road?’” Lopez Ibarra said. “There’s a lot that we can still do.”

When Ojeda was 8 years old, he was helping his dad’s company paint roads in Venezuela with thermoplastic. Now he’s laying down firm and frequent handshakes to get a different kind of marking on the roads.

“Everything always brought me back to transportation and safety,” he said.

Transportation safety is an emotional business; someone dies in a traffic crash every 16 minutes on average in America, according to Toward Zero Deaths. There have been 458 traffic deaths in Minnesota so far this year, a 14% increase from last year.

The 3Mers hope their message of safety will help decrease that number.

When Ojeda and Lopez Ibarra lead their transportation theater presentations, they rattle off stats amid personal anecdotes and always return to the core mission, “helping bring families home safely.”