Public Bikes To Power City Lights
Normally I try to avoid posting on concepts
mainly because they rarely materialize into real world products, no matter how
much we wish they would. But this following concept isn’t just a great idea, it
has great potential as well. In a nutshell, designer Chiyu Chen envisions a
fleet of publicly available hybrid bicycles that passively harvest the kinetic
energy of braking (definitely unlike that generator-light that doubles the
power needed to turn the damn pedal). When a bike is returned to a station the
stored energy is then fed into the city’s power grid and the user’s public transit
account is credited. The user can then use said credit to ride the subway and
bus system. Talk about sustainability!
The whole setup is called Hybrid2, which
relies on the proprietary ‘Hybrake’ regenerative braking system to collect
power. Ideally the plan calls for a proportionate remuneration of time spent
biking and time on public transit. Credit would be handled by RFID card readers
at the stations that would recognize personal ID cards to lock and unlock
bikes, as well as keep track of energy collected and transit credit.
MIT Tracks Trash
Do you every wonder where your garbage
goes? Well, MIT does as they are currently dedicating resources and research
into ‘Project Trash Track’ (if you ask me they should have diverted some funds
to the English department to come up with a better project name). By employing
tracking tags researchers at MIT are monitoring the incredible journey of
various kinds of waste in both New
York and Seattle. Rather than
simply analyzing costs the project will also inform residents about where their
trash is going and what it had to go through to get there. Residents of Toronto certainly
don’t need that level of sophistication as Canada’s
largest city passes into month two of their citywide garbage strike. However,
given the public outcry in over the temporary dump-sites in the city, tracking
larger patterns may help inform consumers that their trash doesn’t simply
vaporize in the back of the garbage truck.
