I’ve recently seen a lot of the Copenhagen Wheel, created by the Senseable City Lab at MIT. It’s a rear 3-speed hub that can retrofit onto just about any bike. It stores energy from cycling and braking in a battery which powers a motor for your bike when you need it. The Copenhagen Wheel communicates with your smart phone so you can adjust the motor setting, changing gears, and even lock and unlock your rear wheel using your phone. Finally, the Copenhagen Wheel takes measurements of Carbon Monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature, and relative humidity which you can use for your own route planning purposes or you can share with others, creating a large crowd sourced bike map. The latter option is what the creators call “the bigger contribution.”
The coolest thing about the Copenhagen Wheel, I think, is the electric motor powered by cycling. Absolutely awesome. It’s a big improvement from the last thing we powered with our pedals, which to my knowledge, were our headlights–which we started doing over a century ago.
One think I’m skeptical about is how controlling your bike with your smart phone will be intuitive, like a “natural extension of your everyday life.” Actually, no, it’s not intuitive at all to use a phone on your bike. At the least, it’s not something I do. And maybe not even very smart or safe. My shifters and brakes are within fingers reach. I don’t have to look at them. I don’t have to move my hands from the handlebars to operate them. They’re actually pretty intuitive to use. I think the press release here wrongly assumes that we use our smart phones everywhere. I wouldn’t be convinced that a smart phone operated shower would be a “natural extension of [my] everyday life” for the same reason. I don’t use my phone in the shower or on my bike. Furthermore, using my phone to turn on my shower or shift gears on my bike would most likely make my life harder, not easier.
Similarly, the problem of smart phone ownership puts limits on which parts of the bike riding population can contribute to crowd sourced bike maps and can benefit from all the resources the Copenhagen Wheel offers.
Here’s an idea I really really like. It’s the Contrail, designed by Studio Gelardi, which is essentially a piece of chalk attached to the frame so that the rear wheel of the bike carries chalk onto the ground, leaving a coloured trail. The main disadvantage of this analog method of crowd sourced bike trail mapping is that it’s not waterproof. Rain, of course washes it away. The upside is that visible markings can be put on streets legally. The bike map is periodically erased and has to be regenerated, whereas the Copenhagen Wheel and any bike route tracking app on a smart phone or GPS stores and aggregates data. One thing I like about the Contrail design is that use is actually very intuitive. You don’t need to look at a map to see what a good route is. The information is exactly where you’re already looking for potholes and rocks. This is pretty cool.
My greatest dream would be for the best parts of the Copenhagen Wheel and the Contrail to be packaged together and distributed (or maybe even pre-installed) so that the map data really accumulates fast. They’re both such cool designs, but ultimately are opt in devices that are hardly cool without everyone else doing it. (The Copenhagen Wheel is also something you opt in if you own a smart phone and have $600 to spare–a qualification that may exceed the abilities of the large number of people who own far less expensive bikes.) Perhaps bike rental places could take the initiative to jump start the map making.
In the meantime, we’ll have to rely on our subjective experience with our terrain, friendly advice, or the maps of super dedicated rider/cartographers like this person’s huge bike map for Dallas.
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