Glow-in-the-dark bike path in Poland? The real thing doesn't look like that

At the beginning of December, the attention of many foreign Internet users was drawn to a photo purporting to show a bicycle path glowing in the dark in Poland. The photo shows a woman riding a bicycle path after dark, running between the sidewalk (on the left) and a row of trees and the river bank (on the right). The path shimmers with blue light, the patterns resemble stars and constellations.

The photo circulated online with captions in English and French. These read: “In Poland, bicycle paths light up at night and are charged by the sun”; “Luminescent bicycle paths in Poland” (editor's translation).

The message circulated mainly in language English and French among others on Facebook. One of the Facebook posts was published in English and Polish. “In Poland, bicycle paths light up at night and charging takes place thanks to the sun. I wish we had more places like this in the world!” – we read in the Polish part of the entry from December 7.

“Incredible”; “I love it! Great idea!”; “What a great idea”; “I really like this brilliant idea… long live Poland!” – some Internet users wrote in English and French.

There were also more skeptical voices among the commentators: “I'm from Poland, I've never seen or heard of anything like this, it's probably fake”; “It looks like AI, but it's a great idea”; “I've lived in this country all my life and I haven't seen one [takiej ścieżki]”.

So we checked whether such or a similar bicycle path exists in Poland, and if it exists, whether it looks as spectacular as in the now popular photo.

The American editorial team looked into the matter fact-checking Snopes. As it turned out, the path exists, but it does not look as popular foreign posts suggest.

It is true that a glow-in-the-dark bicycle path – the first of its kind in Poland – was created at the end of September 2016 on the trail leading to Lake Wielochowskie near Lidzbark Warmiński (Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship).

It does not need any additional power supply, its surface contains the so-called phosphors. These are special synthetic substances that “charge” with daylight and then emit the accumulated energy at night. During the day, the path is blue. The author of the design of the glowing surface is the laboratory of the TPA Institute of Technical Research in Pruszków, and the contractor is Strabag.

Even though the glow-in-the-dark path is only about 100 meters long, it quickly gained the interest of not only tourists, but Polish and world media. In October 2016, Polish media informed about the creation of the path, including: portals tvn24.pl, Polsat NewsOlsztyn “Gazeta Wyborcza“, American ABC News, TechCrunch or British “The Telegraph“.

At the end of 2022, the path surface was renovated, as reported by the portal Infrastructure Market.

A real glow-in-the-dark bike path does not look as spectacular as in the popular graphic. There are no decorative stars and constellations here. The path in the dark has a uniform color. There are only signs informing that the path is intended for cyclists (signs P-23). On the sidewalk on the right, a light-reflecting surface was used to paint a sign indicating that the sidewalk is intended for pedestrians.

Below we present the material about the track, which was created just after its creation in September 2016 and was broadcast on TVN24.

At the end of 2022, the path surface was renovated, as reported by the portal Infrastructure Market. We have not received any press reports that the surface pattern has been changed to one that would correspond to the one shown in popular graphics.

We checked whether the graphics were generated using artificial intelligence tools. One of the tools used for such analysis, True Mediaestimates that at 95 percent the image was generated by AI. Most likely (90% certainty) using DALL-E software, which generates images from the proposed text. Graphics analysis using the tool gave a similar result Hive Moderation. They estimated the chance that the image was created by artificial intelligence at 94.5%.