As Grand Traverse County Road Commission manager Mary Gillis explains it "we threw some paint on the road very quick operation. There are only 20 of them in the entire county so not a lot of expense for what we are going to get out of it."

But what exactly is anyone going to get out of those giant freshly painted white X's that have popped up on our roads? That's the question drivers have emailed me. They saw the giant white X's on roads in Grand Traverse County, but couldn't imagine what was going on? So I stopped in at the Road Commission to find out.

Gillis explains that the X's "are control points. They are painted on the road in certain locations." In fact 20 different locations all around the county, but looking where they are painted, you be hard pressed to find a traffic reason they are where they are. That's because these recently painted X's, don't really impact drivers at all, yet.

The 8 foot wide X's are necessary because the county recently received a grant to update their aerial photographs. The current ones date back at least 6 years. That means in the next couple of weeks, a plane will be flying high above, snapping pictures. The X's are essentially targets and reference points. As Gillis explains "the county has an aerial photographer company fly over and do aerial shots of the entire county, so we use these control points to align the photographer when get them completed so they have an exact line up."

Once all those pictures are taken, they are pieced together to make an online countywide aerial map. Anyone can use it to check out their property for fun, but several county departments use it to do their jobs including, according to Gillis, "the road commission, for our projects we use them for a lot of different applications. If we are going out to look at areas of roads, we can pull up these photo and look at some of the physical condition we are going to encounter or if the shoulders are paved or not from those photos. The photos really give us the current snapshot of what's going on in the real world."