PowerSwitch

BTS's Transglide 2000? bicycle transit system increases urban mobility at a fraction of the costs of traditional modes of urban mass transportation.

Bicycle Transportation Systems

That is very interesting, as someone cycles to work, I 've always wondered would it ever make sense to have covered cycleways with some form of wind assist. To be honest though you would have to price the majority of drivers out of their cars before they would take to it.

It looks neat, but it's a shame they plan to heat and air-condition them as appropriate. The trouble is that they're still thinking within the current paradigm. If you accept a future with far fewer cars, then 15mph on a bike is much better than walking, there's no need for tunnels with air blowing down them - we just need to learn that journeys are going to take longer.

I can't help thinking that blowing air down a tunnel is a pretty crude way of doing this anyway - there will be so much turbulence that a lot of the power will be going to waste. I wonder what the effect would be if the energy & materials that went into building the tunnels and fans went into building batteries and electric motors to assist normal bikes, with renewable energy to recharge them? I still think it's better just to use muscle power though.

mikepepler wrote:If you accept a future with far fewer cars, then 15mph on a bike is much better than walking, there's no need for tunnels with air blowing down them - we just need to learn that journeys are going to take longer.

Ha! SOME journeys will take longer. In the small town I live, almost all journeys shorter than 5 km is done fastest by bike. In the winter it could be up to 8 km because of the need for clearing the car from snow and ice before taking off.

And that is when counting only the time needed to drive. If the time needed to earn the money to buy the car, petrol, tyres and all that is added, I think that almost ALL journeys are faster by bike than by car.

I used to have a car with one of those fancy computers for displaying average speed and such. A terribly depressing experience! That nasty meter inevitabely converged towards 30 km/h, even when I made several longer journeys from time to time. I reseted the darn thing a couple of times before a longer journey and could end up with an average of 70 km/h for a 600 km journey on mostly motorways, but during the following months the evil thing slowly converged towards 30 again.

Add the time needed to earn the money for the car and all that, and the average speed end up like 7 km/h!