Now there is a good reason not to buy an electric bike: the Copenhagen Wheel from the Senseable City Lab can make you go hybrid with the switch of a tire. In a sense, it turns an ordinary hilly city such as Jerusalem and Amman into flat cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam.
Consider this: Bicycles are really efficient. Fully 99 percent of the energy a person applies to the pedals is converted to forward motion. If we converted the calories a bicyclist consumes to the energy equivalent in gasoline, we could say that a bicycle gets about 500 miles per gallon.
Consider that a bicyclist can travel 400% of a walking pace while using the same energy as a walker and produces 1/10th the carbon dioxide of our most efficient cars would when driving the same distance and speed.
This is why a human-powered bicycle is considered to be the most efficient transportation technology on the planet. But don’t tell that to someone trying to pedal up a steep hill.
This might explain why bicycles are popular means of personal transportation in low, flat countries such as Holland, Denmark and why they are crucial for last-mile freight transport in flat places such as Beijing.
This might explain why it’s an uphill battle to get people elsewhere to adopt the most efficient transportation method ever invented.
All of this is about to change: Researchers at MIT developed what they call the Copenhagen Wheel which attaches to any ordinary bicycle as a back wheel. The Copenhagen wheel gathers and stores the energy normally lost when a cyclist is coasting or going downhill.
Then it automatically detects when the cyclist is going uphill and applies a boost via a battery powered electric motor.
It might be just the boost we need to increase the adoption of this efficient technology.
Author: Karin Kloosterman
Karin Kloosterman is an award-winning journalist and publisher that founded Green Prophet to unite a prosperous Middle East. She shows through her work that positive, inspiring dialogue creates action that impacts people, business and planet. She has published in thought-leading newspapers and magazines globally, owns an IoT tech chip patent, and is part of teams that build world-changing products to make agriculture and our planet more sustainable. Reach out directly to [email protected]
The author starts off saying that you don’t need to buy an electric bike thanks to this new invention.
But the end of the article says the bike is powered by an electric motor and a battery.
So…um… doesn’t that make this an electric bike?