How to Make Bike Commuting More Popular
You’ve heard all the arguments about why you should ride your bike: It reduces auto traffic, shrinks your carbon footprint, decreases your transportation costs, and gives you killer calves. But there’s one niggling problem: theft. It seems no matter how many locks, cables, and snakes you use, at one point or another, you’re likely to return to your bike, to find one lone orphaned tire, the rest long gone.
Whether or not this has been your experience, it’s a perception that many people hold, and it’s a factor in holding back bike riding from being more widely used mode of transport. What to do? Enter the Bike Tree. These devices address several issues at once, but let me start with the primary: it stores your bikes high up in the air, for all the world to see, and thieves to be foiled, looking like, yes, a tree made of bikes.
How does it work? Simply.
You use a smart card that identifies you, and a bike hook glides down. Place your front tire in there, and up the bike rolls until it’s securely stored above, with a dome over the top to keep it dry. What if you need an indoor location, and the ceiling is too short for such a device? They also have another one, that has a more elaborate locking system.
Who would use this? Individual commuters, bike sharing services and people who are already good about using trains rather then their car, but there’s the few miles between their house and the station.
Looking at the site, an additional use comes to mind: festivals. Bike Tree claims they can be assembled and moved in 3-6 hours, making them great temporary storage facilities. And, without a cluster of bikes on the ground, they take up less space, and the base could, for those inclined, serve as a place to sit. My one question is, they don’t show it full of bikes, what happens if the handlebars of adjacent bikes get ensnared?
That said, the site says it hasn’t been updated since 2004, and as of press time, I wasn’t able to find out if they are a functional company at this point. Why don’t you drop them a line and find out for yourself? And if they don’t, let this be an inspiration for other creative solutions to life in the modern world.
What other solutions like this do you see to positively affecting urban life? Please share.
Interesting idea. If they’re not still operating, maybe this will at least encourage other eco-entrepreneurs out there to think about this concept.
When I moved to CA I bought my first bike since I was 13 or so. I started taking it to the train station to get to work, and after a week and a half it was stolen. What a bummer! Something innovative like this would have been great.
Thanks Sharon, you’re exactly who I had in mind when I wrote this. When I hear back from the Bike Tree people, I’ll update the article and add a comment here.
I have never had a problem with bike theft, since I’ve lived in very small towns, but this is a cool idea. I used to ride my bike (along with a trailer) to the Co-op all the time and one problem they had was lots of bikes using up all the bike racks. Something like this seems like it would be a great space-saver. However, I doubt if it would work for a bike with a trailer attached…
Now my main deterrent to riding my bike is that I live a few miles from town and the highway has no shoulder at all, so it’s not very safe. Luckily they’re working on widening the highway soon, so I won’t have to be scared for too long. Biking is a great way to get around, hopefully with innovations like this, more people will be inclined to do it!
While visiting my brother, we found someone had cut his bike locks. He had two bikes locked together, and only one was taken. We decided the thief was on foot, and could only make off with a single bike - how could you possibly steal two bikes at once?
Lo and behold, a few months later, I saw someone riding a bike down the road, with another bike slung over the handlebars. I guess they got that problem figured out.
How costly, in terms of CO2 and waste, would be the production of a single bike-tree?
To me, this idea seems to be just another kind of wasting precious resources. Many European cities and towns have come up with simple yet great ideas for locking up your bicycle safely.
Katarina, you bring up some interesting points. Do you have some examples of what you’re talking about in Europe? This actually originated from Europe, as well.
Some other considerations to figure into this equation is, how many more people will choose to bicycle as a result of devices such as these, or other, equally effective options you or others may suggest? This may offset the embodied energy of production of a Bike Tree.
By the way everybody, I just heard from the people at Bike Tree, it does indeed still exist, and they are looking to have the first public installation/sales of them in North America/Canada. Their contact is on the site. Perhaps they have some responses to these points?
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