The worlds engineering minds seem to be obsessed with taking the effort out of riding a bike, whether by starting from the bottom up and making something more like a light motorbike, or trying to modify an existing bike to fit an electric engine somewhere, everyone seems to have a solution. Possibly the neatest and coolest that I have seen in ages is a new MIT project known as the Copenhagen Wheel. The wheel is (pretty obviously) easy to fit to any bike and can give a boost by gathering the energy you put into it by braking or cycling and then allowing you to harvest it when it gets that little bit steeper. It also links up to your iPhone (what do you mean you don’t have one?) and allows you to change gear and lock the wheel to your hearts content, from the handlebars. If that wasn’t enough to distract you, you can also monitor the air quality, noise pollution, road quality and congestion around you. All in case your eyes and ears aren’t working (“ah, I wonder how noisy it is here? – luckily my mobile phone will tell me… – I see it is “loud”, that would explain why I can’t hear anything over the noise”).
Far be it from me to question the superior minds at MIT, but I have some issues. What happens if it rains, and your expensive mobile phone is sitting exposed on your handlebars? Do you really want to know just how polluted the air your breathing in is? And how useful is locking the rear wheel on a bike when you can easily remove the wheel, or the entire bike, anyway?
Finally, given the cold snap at the moment, I like the effort that I have to use to ride a bike, it’s what keeps me from freezing. Also there are useful side-effects like keeping me fit, and the sense of achievement of getting up a big hill. Either way I won’t be rushing out to spend hundreds of pounds to remove the one of the joys of cycling.
A
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