Future Friday

The future, it seems, is still a world of swoopy but minimal lines and where everything will look like it’s made of plastic. That is if you look at this new B1K concept bike from Peugeot. It’s an aggressively styled bike and has a chainless drive system, which answers the eternal question of what you can make designers do when you’ve had a basically right design for several hundred years. The answer is apparently to reinvent the Softride and simply improve slightly on the ugliest bike in the world ever. It looks to me like something that triathletes will embrace at least.

We also know the future will be a busy place, and there’ll be no room to park your bike anywhere overground. Luckily the answer to that problem is already here, or at least in Japan, where underground automatic bike parks are keeping railings and lampposts clear. I’m not sure I’d trust the machine to return the right bike to me, but I’m sure it works perfectly. It’s similar to a solution we featured here a while ago and might mean that they’re proving popular. If they are safe and reliable then it’d be great to see them over here, perhaps to offset the lack of much bike parking even in new office buildings, as Bike Radar points out.

The big question is whether people will still be riding bikes in the world of tomorrow, as children get bigger and bigger through not being active and only spending their time in front of the television (this is sounding more like the Daily Mail every day). Luckily it looks like Gamercize can save the day. Their systems ensure that you can only play computer games as long as you keep pedalling or stepping on their specially designed exercise machines, which means exercise as you play. It will surely make drunken games of Wii Sports Tennis even more dangerous, but perhaps it’s not really designed for that, and otherwise it means keeping active rather than sitting and only working your thumbs. Settle in for a long session and also save yourself getting wet outside as you train for that long charity ride.

The final fear of the future we’ll address here is climate change (never let it be said we don’t know what’s going on in the world). If the snow caps melt and the Gulf Stream shifts (or whatever the current thinking is) we’ll be in for more cold winters and more struggles in the snow. I think it’s about time to buy a ski-bike just in case. Then I just need to find a commute that’s downhill both ways.

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