We all leave little trails behind us

There’s a product that I stumbled across a few weeks back called ‘Contrail’. It’s essentially a bicycle accessory that fits on your back wheel and deposits a coating of coloured chalk onto the surface. As you pedal along, it leaves a coloured tyre mark on the road surface showing where you’ve been.

I’ve only mentioned this to a couple of people and got responses along the lines of “big deal” or “that’s handy”.

The philosophy of the product is this:

Contrail is a tool for developing bicycle communities. As you ride, contrail leaves a faint chalk line behind your bike. The goal is to encourage a new cycle of biking participation by allowing the biking community to leave a unique mark on the road and to reclaim this crucial shared space.

The old cycle: More cars on the road --> more percieved danger for bikers --> fewer bikers on road --> even more cars on the road.

The new cycle: A few bicyclists ride with contrail a couple times per week --> faint lines on the road inspire curiosity and remind bikers where it's safe to ride --> new bikers are encouraged to ride and use contrail --> contrail lines get brighter as community grows.

It’s a cool invention and I can certainly see the point. Essentially, contrail leaves “low tech bike lanes” on the road for other cyclists to follow.

I’m not sure that alone it will convert the world to pedal power but the concept of making biking more visible and fun can only have a positive effect.

I’ve been thinking about Contrail quite a bit in the last couple of weeks and it’s made a big impact on me for a totally different reason.

You see, in my mind, we all leave these little colour trails behind us all the time. Everybody we meet, talk to on the phone, stand next to in shop queues, chat to on Twitter or say good morning to as we walk through the park – we deposit a little bit of our colour onto them.

And if someone were able to follow us (not in the Twitter sense) through our interactions, they’d notice the colours change as we made a different impact on the people we interacted with.

Every time you interact with somebody, you have an opportunity to leave a bright, child’s crayon colour and fill his or her day with happiness.

Equally, you could scribble in turgid brown or green and smudge them into the doldrums.

Think about it.

Read more about contrail.