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How to Paint 50,000 Miles of Lines

On a recent Saturday, Alex Garza painted around 120,000 feet of white edge lines on freeway ramps in Lansing and Brighton, Mich., between the hours of 4 p.m. and 4 a.m.

“A good day would be 400,000 feet,” said Garza, 55, who has been working for PK Contracting, the biggest pavement marking contractor in the state, since he was 22.

Line painting, or pavement marking, is an essential, but rarely considered, speciality within the field of construction that helps us all to get from point A to point B safely.

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Transit historians often credit Edward Hines, one of the Detroit area’s first road commissioners, with inventing the white center line in 1911.

The epiphany was supposedly inspired by watching a milk wagon leave a trail of white liquid behind it.

Before then there was nothing dividing opposing lanes of traffic.

In Michigan, line season kicks off in May. By the end of October, if all goes as planned, PK’s employees will have striped and restriped around 50,000 miles of lines. Lay them out back-to-back and you could cross America 16 times.

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And that’s without accounting for tens of thousands of “bike dudes” — official pavement marker lingo — cross walks, arrows and the accompanying stretched out ONLYs that tell drivers where they can and cannot go.

Each shift begins with an aspirational number of square feet to paint or repaint, said Sam Kischuk, 23, a line crew supervisor and painter.

For Kischuk, a combo arrow is a favorite. To create one she carefully places several stencils on the ground and then sprays over them.

“It’s like a puzzle coming together,” she said.

In contrast, cross hatching is “not fun.” That’s because with each line that makes up a white chevron her crew has to reposition the truck, which shoots paint out the back.

Crosswalks fall somewhere in the middle. They are easy to make straight, Kischuk said but if the road is wide they are difficult to measure out because the crew can only block a few lanes of traffic at a time.

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The painters aim for straightness. They relish the crispness. They try to tune out impatient drivers who yell or honk or even sometimes throw things at them.

But they know that unless they mess up, few will consider their work.

“No one notices a straight line, but you put a crooked line down and everyone notices it,” said Ed DiVirgilio, an equipment superintendent for PK.

Different roads have different needs so painters rely on a range of techniques for drawing the lines that stave off chaos.

Creating an edge on a busy freeway requires extreme speed so line painters turn to a material that dries within seconds. The thermoplastic begins as a powder. Melter trucks, which accompany the paint trucks, dissolve it at 400 degrees.

A crosswalk in Detroit must put up with thousands of tires. The fast drying thermoplastic won’t last there, so the line crew picks a more durable paint even though it might take an inconvenient three minutes to dry.

Some roads call for stencils. Others call for thick strips of tape that can be pressed on with 100 pound weights. The calculus involves traffic patterns, the texture of the ground, cost and weather.

When the weather is good, you have to be prepared to work 12 hour days 8 nights in a row.

Around 3 a.m., staring down at a white edge line, it can be tempting to zone out. You can’t, Garza said, because you might need to adjust the pressure to keep extra hot paint from going down too thick. Or if the air temperature drops, you’ll need to adjust the pressure again to maintain the perfect flow.

Paint consistency is — in a sense — a life or death matter.

When Garza presses a black button spraying white paint on the road, it also triggers a second gun behind the paint gun to sprinkle tiny salt-size glass beads.

If the paint is too thin, beads won’t stick to it. That means the lines won’t reflect light.

Then come nightfall we’d be back to the early 1900s, a time before the roads had lines...

where there was no edge and no center, just one vast unmarked expanse.

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Photographs and video by Ross Mantle for The New York Times. Text by Heather Murphy. Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.