You’ve undoubtedly seen different kinds of reflective tape in multiple areas throughout your life. You can commonly find them on trucks, road signs, and construction sites. Most likely you’ve glimpsed it in your peripherals or barely registered it was there at all. Until you look for it, reflective tape usually just hides in plain sight.
Reflective tape, although commonly used for Department of Transportation or DOT requirements, has many other uses. It’s high visibility and durability makes it a reliable product for a variety of needs.
Sporting Uses for Reflective Tape
Boating
As boating crews return to the dock in early dusk after a day on the lake, a strip of tape helps to guide them into the dock. Likewise, a strip of DOT tape applied to the sides and rear of fishing boats helps to identify the craft to others in darkened conditions. Since there are no street lights out on the water, providing your boat with mid-grade metallic reflective tape makes a world of difference.
Snowmobiling
Thickly falling snow can obscure the skiing party or snowmobile that is directly ahead of you. Reflective tape helps to eliminate this issue of visibility if properly place on the front and rear of the vehicle.
Hunting
As hunters return to their well-camouflaged hunting stands in the trees year after year, a strip of reflective tape installed on the bottom can guide members of their party as they hike back into that wooded canyon at dusk.
It is especially important in urban areas that moving sport vehicles have reflective tape liberally installed. Motorcycles, bicycles, and scooters, often have limited vehicle lighting, a low profile, and are driven in heavy moving traffic.
Reflective Tape & Roadway Vehicles
One of the most common uses for reflective tape is on vehicles. Some recreational cars and trucks may have them, but for the most part, reflective tape is used on commercial vehicles.
Commercial Vehicles
If you would like to add to your vehicle’s ability to be seen, you can use reflective DOT tape around the bumper area and rocker panels of your vehicle. However, certain commercial vehicles have DOT requirements and are also required by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration to have retro reflective conspicuity tape.
Tractor Trailers
Tractor trailers need to use DOT-C2 reflective tape on their sides and rear. DOT certified C2 tape only comes in alternating red and white patterns, however, they can come in 6″ alternations between red and white or 7″ and 11″ alternations.
Government & Safety Vehicles
There are far more uses on other vehicles. Slow moving vehicles, such as snow plows, street sweepers, garbage trucks, mail trucks, construction vehicles, and especially landscaping vehicles all can benefit greatly from installing a few strips of conspicuity reflective tape on the sides or rear of their vehicles.
These kind of vehicles tend to be driven slowly, park on the side of narrow residential streets, and are often parked in dusk hours when they are hard to see. In our litigious society, it gives the fleet owner one more level of protection in the event of a vehicle crash to point out that his vehicle was clearly marked with reflective tape and a crash could have been avoided.
Bright tape colors such as fluorescent lime, blue or green reflective tape can add to your branded image and give consumers another reason to identify your vehicles parked safely on a darkened street.
Driveways, Parking Lots, and Roadways
One of the struggles in life is haphazardly backing out of a curvy or unmarked driveway with obstructions on the sides. You can use reflective tape to mark the edges of your driveway for better situational awareness, as well as mark any close by objects such as boulders, real estate signs, and mailboxes. This can also be useful for commercial buildings and residences for things such as stairways, handrails and guardrails that line a driveway or entrance.
It not only makes it easier for the driver backing out, but the snowplow driver, the mail truck, the delivery truck – all of these and more can easily see your driveway and mailbox as they make their approach.
Parking lots represent accidents waiting to happen. Not only are they crowded with other vehicles, but in this day of urban planning they often have a multitude of landscape islands, not to mention light poles, electrical enclosures, guardrails and other obstructions. Often these obstructions are backed into. A bright strip of reflective tape can greatly help to alleviate such accidents. A harried motorist is arrested by a bright gleam of red reflective tape wrapped around that light pole or electrical transformer, and another crash is avoided.
Reduce Vehicle Theft
You can reduce vehicle theft by installing reflective logo tape on your vehicles.
This is the normal red and white or solid color reflective tape installed but with your company name and logo imprinted within the tape. A corporate fleet of trucks, trailers, and equipment equipment needs to have the reflective logo tape installed to deter theft. This logo tape installed on all fleets instantly identifies the true owner. Such equipment is often easily stolen in remote areas and commands a high value on the resale market leading to a shocking amount of construction equipment theft of $330M to $1 billion of stolen equipment a year.
There are, of course, many more uses for reflective tape for better visibility and convenience. Any place that you would want to be more easily seen, including yourself or your property, would be possible uses for reflective tape.