Tokyo, Japan has long been a place with a massive population and a small amount of land. So as you can imagine they’re always inventing new ways to store their worldly positions without displacing their living space.
The multistory computerized bike parking garage is just one of those things you have to see to believe. The bike slips into the mini freight elevator’s clutches and using an attached electronic tag it drops below the earth’s surface and stores it until the user returns. To retrieve the bike they simply need to swipe a card and the computer will look up its location and retrieve the bicycle. Cost for storage is about $20/month.
OK, so while this bike looks interesting enough, it also looks really for lack of a better adjective, stupid. With the last decade seeing rise to the fixed gear bike (much to my disdain), this bike seems to absolutely epitomize that design mindset with a little impracticality thrown in for bad measure.
Looking at the picture of the dude sitting on this I can’t possibly fathom how you could want to ride this for more than a few blocks. He looks pretty poised to take a dive off the front of the thing as soon as he hits a bump. The only thing inner city about this bike is how ghetto it is. What do we think?
If you’ve ever wondered how you could do more to help save the planet with your morning bicycle commute, then look no more, o ecologically aware one; we’ve got the solution for you!
It’s called the E-Werk, and it’s from Germany. Those of you hearing Vince from ShamWow declare that the Germans make good stuff are not alone, and I’m laughing too. But anyway, the E-Werk hooks to your bike and uses your pedal pushing skills to crank a generator on the go, converting your bike into a portable power generation system. Naturally, there’s not a whole lot of juice that you get out of these, being as you’re just pedalling a bike and all and most of your kinetic energy goes into moving the bike along.
It’s a pretty clever device, make no mistake, and for people who do a lot of biking, then you’re definitely going to want to get your hands on one of these.
Primarily used in consumer grade batteries, Sanyo’s Enloop battery technology has been applied to a bicycle. The Enloop bike can assist the rider for up to 100km by providing 70% of the power and tops out at 15km/h. 3 speeds are available as well as 3 assist modes. I’d assume there’s a power up mode but the linked article is pretty vague.
The Enloop bike will hit the Japanese market for about $1,450 US.
November 13th, 2008 10:04 PM | by Christen da Costa
Here in LA there are dedicated bike routes. Hard to believe I know. Unfortunately, city planners didn’t take that meaning to heart and failed to include sensors sensitive enough to detect bicyclists at traffic lights. This often means sitting at a light for up to five minutes, pushing the pedestrian button, or waiting for a vehicle to pull up.
First off it’s important to know that traffic light sensors (called traffic loop sensors) buried just beneath the pavement’s surface aren’t triggered by a car’s weight, but by the magnetic field the vehicle generates. Ed Richley knew this and says he’s built a device suitable in size for a bicycle that can output a comparable single to ‘trick’ the lights into changing. Called the Traffic Loop Sensor Activator, it’s currently in prototype form only, but Ed, who already managed to patent the device, is looking for manufacturing partners to take it main stream and hopefully in a much smaller size.
