Rent a bike, power a bus, and save money along the way
Written by David Chua
Crawling through my weekend reads, I found this on my RSS reader.
An innovative new idea to not only reduce carbon emissions and to promote public transportation, but also to save some money along the way.
Designer Chen Chiyu has came up with a system, called Hybrid2, that makes use of commuter’s stored kinetic energy from rented bikes to power electric buses and give transportation rebates to the bikers to encourage them to use the buses.
The core of Hybrid2 is Chen’s regenerative braking system for bikes, dubbed “Hybrake”, which allows riders to generate and store energy from braking and normal biking in an ultracapacitor. In Chen’s vision, the more energy a bicyclist generates, the more monetary credit they are given to use on public transportation.
The designer also proposes a solar-powered bike stand outfitted with an RFID card reader to lock and unlock bikes. Personal ID cards will be used to store credit gained from biking for future bus rides, and the whole thing is tied together with a hookup to transfer energy from bikes to the smart grid. Sounds like an ingenious plan for any city trying to reduce traffic congestion!
