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47 Comments
- BREZZZ, on 07/17/2009, -1/+22My bike can hardly power its own headlight.
- TexMexRex, on 07/17/2009, -0/+21But if we taught our horses to ride bikes...
- TexMexRex, on 07/17/2009, -2/+20Dumbest Green idea yet. It is the far out impractical ideas like this that keep real change from happening. How about filling the city with $100 bikes for people to use rather than $5000 bikes that charge busses?
- geogeer, on 07/16/2009, -4/+19Useless. You know how much energy is required to run a bus? the small amount of energy in breaking a bike is insignificant.
- lorddazzer, on 07/17/2009, -0/+13Damn... when I read the title I immediately thought of massive trailer buses with cycles inside for people to cycle together.
Bus Driver: CYCLE HARDER YOU WEAKLINGS!!!! THAT INCLUDES YOU, PREGNANT WOMAN. - WiretapStudios, on 07/17/2009, -1/+14I think you mean braking. Breaking a bike requires quite a bit more energy...
- bromac, on 07/17/2009, -1/+12Dugg for truth.
Imagine how many manhours on a bike it would take to produce enough energy to move a bus even a mile. Harvesting people power to in this manner to haul...people on buses seems ridiculous.
The people on the bus need to get off and power the bikes themselves for 100% efficiency. - Riggaberto, on 07/17/2009, -0/+11I'm sure your feasibility study covered more bases than theirs.
- aknolp, on 07/17/2009, -1/+10I don't think it's feasible, but I like how he's thinking outside of the box.
- mkpaa, on 07/16/2009, -0/+71) Add a hub dynamo and set of batteries to all those bicycles
2) Add a usb charger to stem (or anywhere else)
3) Make that set interchangeable with spinning bikes at gym
Then we have something. :) - anthropodeus, on 07/17/2009, -0/+6this guy is a great engineer (i like how the bikes have built-in bike locks that utilize the docking handlebars, just without the dock), but i find it hard to believe that the small amount of energy created by these bikes will be enough to cover the production cost of the bikes, their generators, and the ultracapacitors. there's also the factor of the inevitable loss of bikes through thievery. this technology will probably become more useful when ultracapacitors and hybridizers drop in price (which would also reduce thievery), but as of right now, they're just gonna lose money.
- SummerofGeorge, on 07/17/2009, -3/+8all the electronics in the bike (especially the battery) would offset the financial and environmental gains this idea is supposed to generate
- anthropodeus, on 07/17/2009, -1/+5Is going to a large building and letting other people leave the building with objects they find in the building as long as they first give me pieces of paper essential to my survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No.
Idiot. - pingveno, on 07/16/2009, -3/+7Exactly. The horsepower on a typical bus numbers in the hundreds. Even the strongest cyclists produce less than one horsepower.
- askantik, on 07/17/2009, -0/+3Please let me know when all these whiny pessimists come up with some better ideas... and actually have the money or brains to design or implement them.
Until then, I wish they'd quit bitching about stuff so much. It doesn't matter if I come up with a design that will allow us to run city buses on my farts-- it's still more effort than most of the people bitching about my idea have put forth. - Wrangler76, on 07/17/2009, -0/+3You need a huge number of people on the public bikes for this to work. It doesn't have to fully power the buses even. I can see this working in Asia where there are millions travelling on bikes in a single city everyday, but it definitely wouldn't work here. I guess it's why some think that 10,000 people on bikes to power a bus is a ridiculous idea- it would never work on our side of the world. Then again, even in Asia, the amount of money needed for this would be better spent on other energy-saving projects.
- Tanktunker, on 07/17/2009, -1/+4Yes, we have reached the point where innovation is essential to our survival, in the primitive manner of adapt or die.
And don't get your philosophy from hollywood. - Lunarsight, on 07/17/2009, -0/+3Even if other commenters are right, and there wouldn't be sufficient energy generated to power a bus, I still think the creator may be on to something - he may just need to set his aims significantly lower.
- zerofour, on 07/17/2009, -2/+5Dugg for his accent.
Haha... What? - misscalifornia, on 07/17/2009, -5/+7What a perfect analogy to socialism.
I get to bust my ass to help the people that were too lazy to ride their bikes in the first place. - ThaCapn, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2Maybe with all these new buses on the roads us road cyclists will be found breaking more often. Great.
- Rammy912, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2How could he have missed that?! That guy is a total idiot...
- WiretapStudios, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2Pedal faster.
- Barackalypse, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2Even if you were peddling on a bike directly hooked to a generator you'd be lucky to generate even a kilowatt hour a day, which is worth roughly 10 cents. A constant 3 watt output, surging to 15 watts while breaking won't come anywhere even close to that kilowatt hour.
- TexMexRex, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2R. D. Stevenson and R. J. Wassersug published an article in Nature 364, 195-195 (15 July 1993) calculating the upper limit to an animal's power output. The peak power over a few seconds has been measured to be as high as 14.9 hp.
- Exurver, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2I was hoping for this as well.
- digggggggggg, on 07/17/2009, -1/+3Any local government that has politicians with half a brain would know that this is unworkable.
- digggggggggg, on 07/17/2009, -0/+2Close. That idea of making a revolving door power a building is even dumber. It would produce enough energy to power all of one light bulb.
Seriously, all these ideas of using people to power vehicles and buildings are just unworkable. If we had the ability to make enough energy for our own use, we wouldn't be in this whole global energy mess. - anthropodeus, on 07/17/2009, -2/+4@ TexMexRex
. . . then we would get a full 1 horsepower? - digggggggggg, on 07/17/2009, -1/+2With the money they would piss away building infrastructure to support this half baked idea, they could actually build a workable solar or wind farm to power the buses.
This guy should go find something else to do with his life. - leipzig3, on 07/17/2009, -4/+5Why not use the electricity generated to accelerate the bike from a stop. That would actually be practical. The big annoyance with stopping for a stopsign is that you lose all your momentum. If you could get some of that energy back in a quick boost to get back up to speed, more people would actually stop at stop signs.
I agree, using the power for buses is useless. 75HP is about 50,000W. It would take a small army of bikes to power even one bus. - nextekcarl, on 07/17/2009, -1/+2I don't think so. If it was unworkable we'd already have them here in Portland I'm sure.
- bigthree, on 07/16/2009, -5/+6very cool concept...good luck getting local governments to implement it though
- HyperZiper, on 07/17/2009, -0/+1They should havve a card-swiping account, and "collect" points for whatever amount of energy you put back into the grid. For clean competition purposes only.
- seanwuzhere, on 07/17/2009, -0/+1Ditto
- nextekcarl, on 07/17/2009, -1/+2That makes some good sense. It could also be helpful when going around hilly areas. Store the power on the downhill when you're braking, use it to make going up the next hill a bit easier.
- Djerrid, on 07/17/2009, -0/+1Me? I was thinking of a more complicated version of this:
http://metamorphicstudios.com/blog/wp-content/uplo ...
Yabadabadoo! - inactive, on 07/17/2009, -0/+1This is a joke, right?
- SystemicThought, on 07/17/2009, -0/+1Or we could just use a regenerative breaking system to store energy and plug it back into the system to lower your electricity bill like people who generate electricity through solar, wind, or exercise equipment in their home already do. I really don't care about the buses. I mean, electric buses are a cool idea, but they don't need to have anything to do with the bikes.
- falconear, on 07/17/2009, -0/+1I think if we had left the bus component out of this as the specific application it would have generated a lot less "yeah whatever" comments on here. Imagine a city in China where thousands ride bikes everywhere. Every little bit helps, eh?
- Googoozilla, on 07/17/2009, -0/+0You could put 5 of these on top of the bus itself...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ5kX5Yw4eY
and that could generate electricity also. - lastthingusee, on 07/17/2009, -3/+3It's a good concept, but completely impractical. To quote William Woody from Engadget:
"First, a bus will probably be in service for 12 hours. Which means you need 10,000 bike riders riding 12 hours a day, or 120,000 bike rider hours per bus. Assuming each person actively rides the bike 30 minutes per session, you'll need a quarter million bike rider sessions. (When I used to ride my bike to work when it was 6 miles away, it took me 35 minutes to get to work.)
And this assumes perfect recapture of energy from the bike rider. With that logic we could run a bus on a gallon of gasoline: the bus could just recapture all of its energy during breaking and reuse that energy starting back up. All the gallon of gasoline would be used for is to start the bus rolling in the morning.
The laws of thermodynamics essentially say you can't break even: there will be losses due to friction and resistance of all sorts. At best using some magical technique you probably could only recapture perhaps 30% of the total energy--which immediately triples all of the estimates above." - shampoovta, on 07/17/2009, -1/+1Old.
Good idea.
It's an old story. - liquidx30, on 07/17/2009, -0/+0it appears that most of the energy comes from the friction of braking.
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