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County roads will soon be a little bit easier to navigate thanks to a planned road restriping project.

County Engineer James Emery explained the process of striping roads to the Troup County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday before approval of the project. Road striping isn’t as simple as many people think, Emery said.

“Road striping is a very unique type of paint. A lot of people think of it as just painting lines on the road, but it’s designed for many, many years. It has also been designed as retroreflective, so that when your headlights hit it at night, it shines back at you,” Emery said.

To have the lines reflect back, round glass beads are both sprayed on top of the paint when it’s laid and mixed into the paint when it’s sprayed. Because the beads are spherical, they always reflect light back. 

The biggest issue with people not being able to see road lines is rain. The lines, even with the glass beads, do not always reflect light directly back from headlights when they are covered in rainwater, Emery said.

“When people complain, I always ask, are you looking at it at night in the rain? Because if you are, even brand new stripes will not reflect right back at you,” Emery said. “In the rain, particularly at night, they look like they disappear. You have to use so much more caution driving at night in the rain.”

Because the lines are difficult to see in the rain at night, most road owners have taken to installing raised pavement markers (RPM), which have a retroreflective material that is raised above the pavement, so they will more effectively shine back, even at night in the rain. 

RPMs are used on many roads in Troup County. Though they are usually only placed in one row down the center line, as standard practice. 

“Our roads are not as wide as state routes and federal highways, and so we use a narrower row of RPMs, as opposed to what you’ll see on state highways. That keeps motorists from hugging the edges of the road. We want them to stay closer to the center and not come off the edge, because that’s very dangerous and could cause crashes,” Emery said.

The county also aims to stripe, not only center lines, but white edge lines, even on roads that are not extremely wide.

To stripe county roads, the county uses a partnership with Two Rivers, a federally sponsored group of 14 counties, including Troup. Many years ago, Two Rivers purchased striping equipment to provide striping service at cost to member counties, without any markup, so member counties would no longer be subject to the higher prices of market-rate contractors.

Most county roads will have up to four stripes, two edge lines, and up to two center lines, with some being dashed. Calculating the exact number of miles of striping is difficult, so 3.5 line miles per road mile is used as an average for calculating the costs to stripe a road.

The county plans to restripe approximately 213 road miles for $493,500.32 through Two Rivers. 

The project will be funded with GDOT Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG) Local Road Assistance (LRA) funding.