regenerating the breaking power to give the bike a boost later would be one thing.
but using it to power buses which are 100 times heavier is the stupidest idea i have ever heard of
i mean imagine a bus and a bike crashing in a head on collision, the bike's kinetic energy has practically no effect on the bus whatsoever while the bus effects the bike dramatically. therefore i think it would make more sense for the buses' breaking energy to be sent to the bikes instead where it would actually have a noticeable effect.
OK.. how about a bus and 10,000 bikes. Who wins there? Because that is what we are talking about. In a large enough city where enough people bike, there are thousands of people who use a bike as their primary, or at least a major, form of transportation. Not every place in the world is as lazy as America. Just visit a big city in Europe (I still remember being in awe of the number of bikes parked next to the train station in Amsterdam... easily a couple thousand) or Asia and you'll see.
@mikey- I was happy to see the number of bikes parked in Barcelona, but the number of people riding them still paled in comparasion to the number of cars and buses on the road. And let us not forget that the first thing that a lot of the bicycle riding in Asia is driven by poverty, not a desire to stay fit or be enviromental concious. I'm not trying to gloss over the fact the US is really bad at devloping and using alternative transportation, but the Europeans aren't as good as we like to imagine them being. Mostly they just travel less- http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=949.
The hybrid bicycle idea just doesn't provide enough energy to make it worth the weight and monetary expense of installing the components except perhaps in the case of electric bicycles. I'm a big fan of electric bikes as they avoid the nastiness of uphill peddling and behave better with car traffic than normal bikes, but still give you most of the energy efficiency of a bicycle.
Enviromentally, getting people out cars is 90% of the battle. Anything else is just gravy.
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regenerating the breaking power to give the bike a boost later would be one thing.
but using it to power buses which are 100 times heavier is the stupidest idea i have ever heard of
i mean imagine a bus and a bike crashing in a head on collision, the bike's kinetic energy has practically no effect on the bus whatsoever while the bus effects the bike dramatically. therefore i think it would make more sense for the buses' breaking energy to be sent to the bikes instead where it would actually have a noticeable effect.
OK.. how about a bus and 10,000 bikes. Who wins there? Because that is what we are talking about. In a large enough city where enough people bike, there are thousands of people who use a bike as their primary, or at least a major, form of transportation. Not every place in the world is as lazy as America. Just visit a big city in Europe (I still remember being in awe of the number of bikes parked next to the train station in Amsterdam... easily a couple thousand) or Asia and you'll see.
@mikey- I was happy to see the number of bikes parked in Barcelona, but the number of people riding them still paled in comparasion to the number of cars and buses on the road. And let us not forget that the first thing that a lot of the bicycle riding in Asia is driven by poverty, not a desire to stay fit or be enviromental concious. I'm not trying to gloss over the fact the US is really bad at devloping and using alternative transportation, but the Europeans aren't as good as we like to imagine them being. Mostly they just travel less- http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=949.
The hybrid bicycle idea just doesn't provide enough energy to make it worth the weight and monetary expense of installing the components except perhaps in the case of electric bicycles. I'm a big fan of electric bikes as they avoid the nastiness of uphill peddling and behave better with car traffic than normal bikes, but still give you most of the energy efficiency of a bicycle.
Enviromentally, getting people out cars is 90% of the battle. Anything else is just gravy.