Somewhere on Highway 55 in Buffalo, Minnesota, there is a giant pac-man gobbling a giant dot painted on the road.
The whimsical "street art" (if you can call it that) reminds drivers how far apart to stay from the car ahead of them:
The 7-foot dots are 225 feet apart, the distance needed at the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit, to stop in three seconds without rear-ending the vehicle ahead. Accompanying signs tell drivers to keep two dots apart in the stretch, traveled by an average of 16,000 vehicles a day.
Project traffic data collected on three July weekdays by the state Office of Traffic Safety showed that the dots had slowed drivers by almost a third of a second, to 2.6 seconds between vehicles monitored halfway through the two-mile section of dots.
For awhile it was just the outline, then about a week after that appeared whoever did it came back and colored it in. An accomplishment for sure- that highway is one of the busiest around.