Innovating the next age of social infrastructure, A company in Poland is trailing a new type of road material. The company that is behind this, #TPA sp. z o.o, is an engineering firm focused on future tech. Their seeing this project as a means to attract more biking enthusiast while hoping this will also support the move to reduce dependence of cars on the road. As the project progresses with proof of the concept and its social impact, it hopes to expand the application of the material to larger roads. It’s expected that soon #Warsaw will see these paths spring up soon with glow of multiple colora.
The lane uses luminophores – chemicals that “ingest” light – to keep the bike path nicely lit at night. They chose blue to “match the Mazurian landscape” where lakes abound. You can read a bit more at Gazeta Wyborcza and if your Polish isn’t too good you can use #Google chrome in helping to translate the page. As many emerging economies look to infrastructure development, I hope the leadership and policy makers are seeing ahead into the future and rather than investing in more exeoensive roads and other heavy road-based infrastructure, look to more free and health-incentivised projects that enable the mass and populace live healthy lifestyle.
Across many European countries, increasing canibalization of streets into walk and bike lanes are growing. In Spain you’ll see May of the street networks fully converted with road blocks that only permit Taxi drivers and residents to access such routes with IoT enabled stations. Similarly in Amsterdam, the tradition of bike riding to work has become so part of the cutlture and enabled transform work offices into places where after ride to office bikers can refresh themselves and work.
London recently put up an ambitious project which includes an overhead bike lane that will link parts of the city of London. Transposing similar concept to Africa, cities around coast line can learn many of these strategies to help in building emerging cities into pure green and healthy spaces for citizens. As corruption continues to be the huge issue hampering the prudent development of African cities, perhaps it’s also important that citizens around such countries will in their various exposure to the such news can require local research and development agencies, municipal assemblies and others to demand the right investments for their cities.