About Contrail

Contrail is a public art project that celebrates shared spaces, helps make bicycling safer and more fun.

How to Use Contrail

Contrail attaches to your bicycles and, as you ride, the device leaves a colorful trail behind you.

Contrail uses washable, non-toxic chalking fluid made from eco-friendly pigments. Like a jet's contrail, the lines on the road will fade with time and rain. For more details, see FAQs.

When to Use Contrail

Contrail can be used used to lead bike-to-school rides or help large fundraising rides make sure no one gets lost. Contrail is also a way for a cyclist to mark their own path, whether through play, like drawing giant flowers, or for safety, mapping out a potential bike lane.

Our Hopes for Contrail

1. Encourages more people to start biking
2. Gives bicycling a stronger presence
3. Help cities rethink the use of public spaces

More about the makers

Co-Inventor
Pepin Gelardi is an Industrial Designer and Mechanical Engineer who has developed products as diverse as bathroom fixtures, cosmetic applicators, and iPod accessories over the past ten years. He is now devoting all of his efforts to producing Contrail and other community-building devices for ULICU.

Co-Inventor
Teresa Herrmann is interested in the effects things have on communities. She has experience marketing green design for Sunlyte Packaging and writing about architecture and sustainability for The Architect's Newspaper and SolveClimate. Teresa loves to ride her Shogun bicycle through her Prospect Heights streets.

About the company ULICU

ULICU (oo-lee-soo) is named after the Serbo-croatian word for 'street'. We build and nourish sustainable communities through events, public art and product design. We are a social innovation company that rethinks the ways communities and products interact.