A Dutch design company hopes to bring its Van Gogh-inspired glowing bicycle path to Toronto in time for the Pan Am Games next year.

Thousands of fluorescent-paint-coated stones are embedded in the 1-kilometre-long path. The stones absorb light during the day, and at night they glow in a swirling pattern inspired by the Dutch painter’s The Starry Night.

The path gives off a soft, “poetic light,” enough for a user to see ahead but without producing significant light pollution in the wooded area, designer Daan Roosegaarde said.

Studio Roosegaarde designed the path and built it in collaboration with Dutch engineering company Heijmans.

The path connects two water mills depicted in Van Gogh’s work, both in Nuenen, east of Eindhoven, Netherlands.

“It’s about public spaces, which are shareable, making them energy efficient and beautiful,” Roosegaarde said.

The paint will glow for up to eight hours after charging in the sun. On cloudy days, both the bike path and highway lighting paint can be lit with LED lights with electricity generated by solar panels.

The firm is now looking at replicating the project elsewhere in the world.

“We’re getting calls like crazy from all over the world. People get really excited about the environment, for either safety reasons or energy reasons, or just making something incredibly beautiful,” he said.

One of those interested cities is Toronto. The firm has not signed a contract but he says it has had preliminary discussions with the city planner’s office about working on a similar project, possibly on the Toronto waterfront – ahead of the 2015 Pan Am Games.

The City of Toronto did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If built in Toronto, the path would need some site-specific tinkering, he said, including heating, or some solution to deal with snow buildup.

Local and provincial governments in the Netherlands invested about $1 million in the bike path project, which was commissioned for a year-long series of commemorative projects that will begin in 2015, or 125 years after Van Gogh’s death.

The whole project took about eight to 10 months to complete, said Studio Roosegaarde business development manager Jamaica den Heijer.

With some refinement, Roosegaarde said he expects the cost of the fluorescent lighting, which requires little supporting infrastructure, will be close to the cost of traditional street lighting and cheap enough to duplicate elsewhere.

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The project is part of the studio’s Smart Highways project, which envisions energy-efficient street design and infrastructure that uses visual information to tell the user about road and weather conditions.

“We have to build in a different way, a more creative way, if we are going to make cities which are future proof. The way we’re doing it right now is not going to work anymore, and people are starting to realize that,” Roosegaarde said.