Ever since I started driving in the US, I’ve noticed large red splotches on the road. They’re usually right there in the lane, long splashes of color that go on for yards and yards. It’s like someone upended a bucket of red paint while driving - in fact, my wife insists this is the case. I can’t help but wonder if it’s blood.
My wife’s paint theory makes a lot of sense - there’s hardly ever any animal carcases lying on the road near the splashes, and the color hardly ever looks like sun-baked blood (it’s usually a bit brighter and more cheerful than dried blood ought to look.)
My blood theory has the following items supporting it: It’s almost always on suburban or rural roads; almost never in the city. The splash pattern often times shows a big splat near the beginning, with clumpy splotched at regular intervals, as if a critter were still caught on a wheel; a paint can splash usually manifests as a large splash area at the start followed by a rather steady narrowing of the area as you progress. Lastly, it’s almost always red - I sometimes see any white splotches, and hardly ever any other colors (these other colors I can accept as paint-can-induced exceptions to the blood theory.)
For what it’s worth, I first noticed these in the back roads in and around several Utah cities, and I see them all the time in and around suburban Fort Worth.
Road-kill blood on the pavement doesn’t stay red for very long; as soon as it’s exposed to oxygen, it begins to turn brown. And I’ve seen plenty of roadkill in my time, but I’ve never seen huge gallon-sized smears and blobs of bright red blood on the pavement, with no attendant mangled corpse. When you hit a cat or a raccoon, your car tire doesn’t smear it all over the road underneath it so that nothing’s left but the blood smear, not even the skin.
Why can’t it be paint? Besides common house paints for various purposes, there are also anti-fouling paints for the bottom of your bass-fishing boat. which come in red among other colors. How many bass fishermen in the greater Fort Worth area drive off from Handy Dan’s every Saturday with a gallon of red anti-fouling paint on the bed of the pickup, and how many of them have it bounce out onto the road?
Just because there’s–to your way of thinking–a lot of it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s roadkill blood. It just means there are a lot of folks who don’t “get” that you can’t just tuck a couple gallons of paint into the back end of your Soccer Mom Van, with the hatch open 'cause the lumber is hanging out the back end, and drive off with it.
Next time you see some, hop out and take a sample.
We had a similar thread a few months back. What you may be seeing is fire suppressant dropped by aircraft. I spent 24 years on the road and I would see this quite often during and after the fire season.
I’m no expert on roadkill, but in my experience the blood is the first thing to disappear. Even when it persists, it’s usually fairly faint… But I recall seeing some blood-red streaks on roads where accidents had occured–some kind of car fluid?
There’s no shortage of all sorts of colored paint splots on the roads here. Everything from small splats that may have been a partial gallon can or even a spray can, on up to huge multi-lane off-white oceans that came from a five-gallon pail of “contractor white.”
If you can think of an item that will fit into a vehicle, somebody’s dropped it on our freeways. I see a lot of ladders, bits of furniture, extension cords and rope every day. The rope always puzzles me: Wasn’t it tied to something? Where is the thing it was holding down?
I was just out driving in Minneapolis today, and saw similar splotches of greenish-yellow color.
Eventually I noticed some being formed: it was a mixture of today’s snow & rain, plus green & yellow leaves falling from trees, being mashed by car tires into a pasty splotch on the road.
Could the red splotches you’re seeing be coming from this? Do you have a lot of dark red tree leaves blowing around the area?