MIT spinout Superpedestrian plans to begin building electric bikes for companies that rent shareable bikes, writes Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. Bray notes that Assaf Biderman, Superpedestrian chief executive, feels that, “adding electric motors to shared bikes should sharply increase their popularity.”
Research Engineer Bryan Reimer speaks with Anthony Brooks of WBUR’s Radio Boston about the possibility of creating more car-free zones in Boston. Creating a car-free zone is possible, says Reimer, but “it’s going to take a long-term focus and shifting the vehicular traffic around.”
In an article for The Boston Globe about electric bike systems, Hiawatha Bray writes about the Copenhagen Wheel, a battery-powered wheel developed by MIT researchers. “The wheel turns almost any standard bike into a two-wheeled Tesla,” writes Bray, who recently tested the wheel on the streets of Boston.
Boston Globe reporter Beth Teitell spotlights how Chris Miller, a staff member at Lincoln Lab, examined ridership of the bikes in Boston’s bicycle-sharing system as part of a data visualization challenge. Miller found “six of the system’s 1,800 bikes had been ridden only once or twice each in all of 2016. The average bike in service makes close to four trips — per day.”
The Copenhagen Wheel, created by Senseable City Lab researchers, transforms a regular bicycle into a semi-autonomous mode of transport, writes Bob Woods for CNBC. “We realized that unless you somehow change the bike, it's hard to imagine it as a solution for transportation, and that means increasing its capacity to go farther,” explains Assaf Biderman, the lab’s associate director.
In a BBC News article about the resurgence of bicycling, Kent Larson, director of the Changing Places group, describes the bicycle his group is developing. “You think of the demographic profile of [a] bike rider now as quite limited,” says Larson. “We are working on an electric vehicle that we think of as democratising bike lanes."
Graduate student Jeffrey Rosenblum participates in a discussion on WBUR’s Radio Boston about biking in Boston. Rosenblum argues that people need more transportation options so they can “drive for the trips that make sense to drive, and they can bike for the trips that make sense to bike, and take transit.”