Culture

This $100,000 “Singing Road” Was So Annoying It Was Removed After A Day

"It's as if someone is in your backyard with a trumpet"

by Sam Langford  13 April 2018
dutch singing road

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Roadworks are annoying in every country, but The Netherlands have found a way to take the suffering to another level. Last week, the Dutch government spent the equivalent of over $100,000 AUD installing a strip of highway that plays the national anthem when cars drive over it, very loudly.

If that sounds like torture, you’re on the money. It took just over a day for the “singing road” (or “zingende weg”) to piss off locals so much that it’s now been removed.

The singing strips were actually intended as a safety device, albeit an extremely weird one — cars driving over the road at the correct speed would be treated to the national anthem, while cars at different speeds would hear distorted versions. Unfortunately, the plan backfired a bit, as the sound was so annoying that cars reportedly began speeding over the strips to make the ordeal end sooner.

Locals told news outlets the experience was “psychological torture”. “The Frisian national anthem is fun, but not 24 hours a day,” one resident complained to RTL News, likening the noise to a vuvuzela. Another person said it was “as if someone is in your backyard with a trumpet”.

This isn’t even the first time the Dutch have tried to combine music and transportation. Amsterdam installed a “sing along bike path” (or “zangfietspad”) in 2013, with signs encouraging cyclists to sing aloud without shame as they roll merrily along. The path was in response to a dubious statistic — apparently 75% of Dutch cyclists sing when cycling but get embarrassed upon encountering others.

While that cycling path lives on, thankfully the government responded quickly to remove the singing road. The sound lives on on video, though — you can hear it below. You can almost hear the $100,000 burning.