Street-side mood lighting, bike tips and tactics

Spacing‘s associate editor Shawn Micallef has an article in the Globe and Mail today about street-side mood lighting in Wrexham, Wales. “If music soothes the savage beast, can mood lighting help to curb late-night drunken violence? The city of Wrexham, in northeast Wales, thinks it does. In December of last year, city officials installed 115 LED lights in the pavement along Bridge and Brooks Streets, in the centre of Wrexham’s club district. The lights change colour on a 10-minute cycle — from blue to red to green, with shades in between.”

And the Globe‘s Jeff Gray has a cheeky riders’ guide for those on a bike. “Congratulations! You have chosen to navigate your city in a personal human-powered transportation device (PHPTD), known commonly as a bike. More and more users are discovering the transportation power and convenience of this device. But, just like the Internet or other technologies, there are serious safety hazards.”

Over at the cycling blog Toronto Cranks, there is an interesting post urging cycling advocates to stop using the “save the environment” argument when they try to get people out of their cars and on to bikes. Instead, bike proponents have to make the economic case which is much easier for people to understand — it’s hard to see, on a day-to-day basis, the harm cars are doing to the earth, but you can easily see the wads of cash that are flying out of a bank account and into a gas tank. This tactic is coming from Darren Stehr, one of Toronto’s most outspoken cycling advocates.