The other week I was taking one of my motorcycles to be inspected here in Shanghai. On the way home it started to POUR, slow at first but buckets shortly after. I of course did not bring rain gear with me this trip... ( rememeber saying " its just to the inspection station and back I dont need to carry anything")
In Shanghai at least, we all know even dry white lines on the road are slippery, not to say anything about them wet. I have had a buddy hospitalized for 2 months with head injuries after drivning over a zebra line during the rain.... They are just so damn slippery and to and fuel to the fire they tend to be "domed" or raised with sloping edges to make them almost guarenty that you will slip while riding, standing or even walking over them.

But I digress,

As it was raining on me I continued to drive home and I approached a set of the those thick cross walk white lines (zebra lines) I tried to pick a path between them (the lines) on to clear black tarmac when someone blindy rode their e-bike right out infront of me in the intersection, braking hard to avoid the collision I feared the worse about to happen.... only to find they are NOT slippery.... say what. Noticing that there was no slippage of any kind I looked back and down and saw some odd texture to the line. I asked myself could it be??? could the city actually do something that cost extra money, just for road safety for motorcycles (cars are unaffected by the slippery lines do to four wheels). Seeing that I was outside a large department store, I assumed that they had done it for insurance reasons and not the city.......

But then today I saw this on Wu Zhong Lu near Hong Qiao:

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Textured Zebra lines. Clearly not a mistake as all four crossings had them uniformly added to older lines. That right it was added only a week or so ago...

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You can see that the texturing is quite pronouced and the grip is solid ( I tested it with the TR today, the locals thought I was nuttz).
The texture material was not hard, but in fact more similar to rubber in the sense that it was slightly spongy. It did NOT have any sand in it or other grip enhancing grit but it was not slippery to the toach, again similar to rubber.

It seems that Shanghai is slowly getting it, the road sytem needs upgrading and I guess they are working on it, still it blows my mind to see it... Whats next motorcycle only lanes during rush hour.... Yeah right