Cat's Eyes

It was late and it was dark and I had the road to myself. As I was driving along the lights bored a tunnel through the darkness illuminating the stripes of white paint and cat's-eyes in the road. I could see four or five of these little reflectors buried along the centre line of the road. As each flashed past another lit up in the distance.

Five, I could see five at once except that sometimes the fifth was a little late in flashing into visibilty. Sometimes it was early, and I could see six at once. I started paying a little more attention now, looking forward to the occasions when I could see the sixth.

It helped relieve the tedium of that late night drive a little. I'd had a long and not very interesting day, starting early and finishing late. It would be midnight before I got home and I'd done the drive many, many times before. Apart from the random refrigerator rolling into the road [1] I was expecting no surprises that evening but the spacing of the cat's eyes was something I had never considered before.

I started keeping an eye out for the sixth cat's eye flashing into sight. And noticed there was a sort of rhythm to their appearance. Questions started to occur to me. What is the spacing between cat's eye reflectors? Does this spacing vary if the cat's eyes are installed on motorways, dual carriageways, other A roads or urban areas? How is the spacing measured when these are installed? Does the maintenance crew pace out the distance or use a chain or a tape measure? Once they are installed is the spacing checked and what is the tolerance on the spacing? For instance, if the cat's eye is two inches out would this be acceptable? Two feet? Missing altogether? Like any other motorist I had got used to seeing cat's eyes on roads and like any other motorist I had never spent much time thinking about them but these questions lodged in my mind.

The rest of the drive passed in the same way as any other tedious and tiring late night drive does. I arrived at my home, parked the car, entered my house, undressed and went to bed. If I dreamt of cat's eyes while I slept I do not remember.

The next day I awoke with the questions of the night before on my mind. I had a day off work so after my usual daily morning routine I sat down at my computer and drafted a polite enquiry to the highways department of my local council. Even if they didn't reply then just framing the questions in words and sending them to someone else to deal with might stop them from going round in my head for days. It was a tactic I'd used before when random questions raised themselves, if you cant find an answer then find someone else to find an answer for you. Although it reveals a slightly obsessive side to my personality, it also makes me a wizard to have on pub quiz teams.

...oooOooo...

Days came and went until the day I got my reply from the highways department. Apparently it's a bit complicated but essentially the cat's eyes I was staring at on that night were placed 20.116 metres apart. I thought that was curious number until I checked, and it is 22 yards. A measurement of ancient derivation, one tenth of a furlong of which there are eight to a mile. Obviously the measurement goes back to pre-metric days. This means the beam of my headlights was picking up five cat's eyes with the fifth being one hundred and ten yards away. The exceptions, where I could see a sixth must have been where the beam picked up the cats eye one hundred and thirty two yards away unless that sixth cat's eye was less than one hundred and thirty two yards away. Once again my mind started spinning with the new question, was that sixth cat's eye less than one hundred and thirty two yards away or not? If not, why not. I could feel a prickle of obsessive compulsion creeping up on me. A plan started to form in my mind, a plan involving a fluorescent high-visibility jacket I happened to own, a tape measure and a clipboard.

On the Highways Agency website I had scoured to find a contact for my enquiries was a list of roadworks in the area. I made some phone calls and secured permission to visit one where a couple of miles of roadway was being scraped up and resurfaced. Officially I was being allowed onto the site in the company of one of the local authority surveyors as an exercise in dealing with the local residents. Apparently they had some sort of mandate to reach out into the local community on local affairs and were delighted with my interest.

Came the day I was there, jacketed and equipped with a blank clipboard to meet the surveyor. I explained my interest in cat's eye spacing and learned from him that the roads were indeed planned with a twenty two yard spacing between cat's eyes and that this was measured out with a measuring wheel. In the case of the works we were visiting that day the old cat's eyes were being dug out with pneumatic drills before the road surface was being scraped clean with a planing machine. Following the planing the cat's eyes were re-planted and bedded in with a bucket of hot asphalt before the fresh asphalt was laid down around them. Since the cat's eyes were being re-planted in the holes from which they had been dug out there was a chance that they could move a little from their original locations.

I was introduced to the site foreman who was happy for me to survey the cat's eye positioning on the road ahead of the works and behind the works, as long as I kept out of the way of his team. The local authority had a disclaimer for me to read and sign which absolved the local authority of all liability should I come to harm. Once this was done the local authority surveyor shook my hand and left me to it.

Having no measuring wheel I was using my own steel tape measure. This had a spikey metal tab on the end which was just the job for pegging into turf while measuring out a tennis court or cricket pitch or football pitch, I found it was useful for sliding into the fixing for the cat's eye and would come loose with a firm tug on the tape. This would save me walking backwards and forwards too often through the roadworks. I started at one end of the works and methodically worked forwards counting off cat's eyes and measuring the gaps between them. Most were at the official distance of 20.116 metres apart but occasionally one would be short by as much as two metres. I was pleased to find this met my expectations but I refrained myself from getting too excited about my results until all the numbers were in. It took several hours to complete the survey and I spent some of the time watching the road maintenance crew at work. Of course my presence set them on edge since the tape measure and clipboard spelt authority even though my lack of interest in the their work had been explained by the site foreman.

The day came to an end and I took my results home with me and sat in front of my computer to commence my analysis. The length of road which I had examined was slightly under two miles, I had expected to find a cat's eye every twenty-two yards or ten to a furlong or eighty to a mile or one hundred and sixty one in the survey. I had collected one hundred and fifty five measurements from which I estimated the the length of the roadworks was less then the two miles mentioned by the local authority surveyor. As the numbers entered the spreadsheet though, a different picture emerged. As I said. I had measured the spacing between the cat's eyes either side of the area being worked and paced out the gap where the road-laying team had been at work. As I added up the measurements this revealed that the length of the roadworks was slightly over two miles meaning the the cat's eyes were more spread out that they should be.
I decided to split my list in two, one for the stretch of road which had been renovated and another for the stretch of road waiting to be torn up and repaired. This would remove the uncertainty about the paced-out measurement of the road works themselves and also provide me with a 'before' and 'after' set of data so I could establish any change in cat's eye spacing which resulted from the road works themselves.

Once I had finished tabulating my data I attached it to a email and sent it off to the local authority surveyor as a sort of thank you for his cooperation.

My analysis of the variance in the gaps between the cat's eyes had started to show a pattern from that night of the tiring and tedious drive. From that I had built the premise that all roads are roughly similar since they employ the same techniques for their building an construction and if any pattern were discernible in one stretch of road then it might be discernible in an other. (Hence my random selection of a stretch of road nearby for my first analysis with hard data)

The hard data revealed a pattern. Sure enough some cat's eyes were closer together than intended and this number was larger than the number of cat's eyes that were further apart than intended. The second fact to emerge was that the renovation of the road, the uprooting and replanting of the cat's eyes did nothing to change this irregularity since the road maintenance crew tended to put the cat's eyes back where they had found them.

It was my intention to stop at this point. So far all it had cost me to arrive at these seemingly trivial truths was a couple of emails and a day spent wandering up and down road works. However my local authority surveyor friend had other ideas. A week later I received a letter inviting me to county hall and a meeting about my 'project'.

...oooOooo...

“It's not a project” I repeated. “It's just idle curiosity and my curiosity has been satisfied.”

The meeting was not happy with this and did not want to hear it. In the introductions I had learned that my local authority surveyor friend was intending to get his Fellowship to the Institute of Road Menders sorted out so he could get his promotion sorted out. (I'm sure this august institution has a much more formal name, but I can't be bothered to recall it and the acronym "FIRM" stuck in my mind). At the meeting was his line manager, his academic supervisor and two representatives from the human resources department. It seems my casual analysis had kicked over a can of worms and they wanted to engage me as some sort of research assistant to survey all the roads in the county. The local authority was in line for some European Community money for road improvements and my analysis had shown that the local authority's claims for compliance with international road building standards had been put in doubt by my research. Since I had shown that one of their claims to be unfounded in fact, relating to the spacing of cat's eyes, the the rest of their business case was tainted by association. That's politics for you.

“We're offering you a two-year fixed term contract to measure and report on cat's eye spacing for the whole county. That's ring fenced money and you'll be your own boss.”

I considered my flagging career in IT consultancy. The long tedious drives home in the dark and my fondness for wearing a high visibility jacket and hard hat.

“Done”. I said. “I'll start Monday”[2].

[1] This refers to the 'Schrodinger's Fridge' theory of hazard management. The theory blends aspects of quantum theory and the hazard management techniques taught to advanced motorists and motorcyclists. The genesis of this theory can be traced back to a group of motorcyclists chatting down the pub (See also http://www.ixion.org.uk)

[2] The above is a work of fiction. Thank you to all you lovely people who congratulated me on finding gainful employment but I'm afraid your congratulations are misplaced.

[3] Damn you, Frame.