Tag Archives: Bicycles

Madrid Begins Electric Bike Sharing

For something that took years to arrive, Madrid’s public bicycles sure get off to a fast start. Pedal once and the 36-volt, 10-ampere, electric motors will give you a sudden boost. Going up one of Madrid’s many hills, it is a welcome aid. Downhill, the burst jars. But riders can disable the boost by not pedaling, and moderate it with electric controls on the handlebars. With a little practice, the bikes begin to feel like underpowered motor scooters. “Our major goal is to move journeys that are now done by car to the bicycles,” says Elisa Barahona, Madrid’s director of sustainability and environment.

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Health Benefits of Bike Sharing Depend on Age, Gender

In the middle of the evening rush hour last November 29 more than 1,000 London cyclists staged a “die-in” to protest the traffic deaths of fellow riders and to demand more investment in bike-friendly roads. London’s streets may have grown friendlier to cyclists since the 2010 introduction of its Barclays Cycle Hire bike-sharing system but according to those at the protest, London is still too dangerous. The hundreds of cities that have launched bicycle-sharing systems in the last decade offer similar reasons for doing it: Bicycling reduces car traffic and pollution in city centers and is healthy exercise. But although all road-users benefit from less-crowded streets, a recent study suggests that the health benefits of bike-sharing programs depend on who is doing the riding.London’s bike-sharing program had registered 191,702 users at last count. Public health researcher James Woodcock at the University of Cambridge in England and his colleagues imagined, and calculated, how those riders lives might have been different had they not used the bikes. They examined data from 2.1 million hours of use between April 2011 and March 2012 and compared the health impact of those 2.1 million hours with the alternatives: more walking, public transit use or driving. To their surprise, the team reports in the February 13 BMJ (British Medical Journal), the switch to cycling may not have been helpful for young women. The health benefits also seem to differ by age, with older riders of both genders gaining more benefits than younger ones.

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Copenhagen Pioneers Smart Electric-Bike Sharing

Copenhagen, the city that popularized bike sharing in the 1990s, is replacing its coin-operated clunkers with electric motor–assisted bicycles with their own touch-screen instrument panels. The bikes, which the city beta-tested this past September and October, house motors that can provide up to 450 watts of power from a battery pack that’s rechargeable at dozens of docking stations around the city. But all that power may be too much of a good thing.

Beta testers last month “got very good at keeping [their] momentum to where the engine does most of the work,” reports Niklas Marschall, CEO of Cykel DK, the program’s operator. That was the first lesson Cykel DK learned: Riders will go to great lengths to avoid exerting themselves. Continue reading Copenhagen Pioneers Smart Electric-Bike Sharing