joeychizzle
光復香港，時代革命
Most of us riding whips now, or public transport. Not alotta people ride bikes anymore. I rode alot during high school and university, but ain't pedaled in months. Having said that, It'd be good to grab a bike and ride around sometimes.
I saw this shyt on weeds a while back, but now they are actually gonna start shippin em. Would you cop?
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—On a sunny but brisk spring morning near the Charles River in Cambridge, I took a test ride on the bicycle of the future. No rockets or lasers (alas), the bicycle of the future looks pretty much like the bicycle of the present. But with the first pumps of my feet on the pedals, I felt the difference. The bike wasn't just moving, it was pushing, adding extra propulsion to my own pedaling, giving me a boost with every revolution of the pedals. Faster than expected, I reached the end of a quiet block leaning into a corner. I took a straightaway for a few blocks and pushed 20 miles an hour without hardly trying. My feet were putting out a solid paper-route effort, but the bike had me racing in the Tour de France.
The bike I tested was equipped with the Copenhagen Wheel, an electric pedal-assist motor fully contained in the oversized red hub of an otherwise normal back bicycle wheel. Inside that red hub is a delicately crammed array of computing equipment, sensors, and a three-phase brushless direct current electric motor that can feel the torque of my pedaling and add appropriately scaled assistance.
Replace the back wheel of any bike with the Copenhagen Wheel and it's instantly an electric bike—one that not only assists the rider but senses the surrounding topography and can even collect and share data about environmental, traffic, and road conditions. First developed in 2009, through a partnership between MIT'sSenseable City Lab and the City of Copenhagen, the wheel is now in its first stages of commercial production. By the end of 2014, thousands will be shipped out to fulfill pre-orders around the world.
With its focus on design and simple application of complex technology, the Copenhagen Wheel is perhaps the sleekest version of the electric bike. But it's hardly the only one. Millions of electric bicycles are being used in cities all over the world, offering cheap and accessible forms of transportation in developing countries and dense urban environments. And though bicycling has long been considered recreation in the United States, the electric bicycle is about to become the next big thing in urban transportation.
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The electric bicycle is a relatively new idea. In its basic form, it's a battery-powered motorized bike operated either by a manual throttle on the handle bars or by an automatic system that adds power when pedaling. About 20 years ago manufacturers began to offer these lighter and cheaper alternatives to mopeds and motor scooters.
Frank Jamerson has been watching the market evolve since the beginning. An engineer who helped build the first nuclear submarines at Westinghouse and who later helped run the EV-1 electric vehicle program for General Motors, Jamerson started publishing the Electric Bikes World Report, a bi-annual profile of the global market for electric bikes, in 1995. Then, as now, China led the way, according to report co-author and chairman of the Light Electric Vehicle Association, Ed Benjamin.
China was an early adopter of electric bikes and still leads the world in sales, with 32 million in 2013. (2 dogs / Flickr)
Benjamin and Jamerson estimate that 32 million electric bikes were sold in China in 2013, though they note that the Chinese bikes are often low-quality, costing a few hundred dollars on average and only lasting for a year or two before breaking down. In Europe, the next biggest market, where most of the electric bikes are higher quality and sell for upwards of $3,000, Jamerson and Benjamin estimate about 1.4 million sales in 2014. Japan and India are other major markets, with sales in the hundreds of thousands.
In the United States, the numbers are smaller but growing. From July 2011 to June 2012, American consumers bought about 100,000 electric bikes, according to Jamerson's estimates. The next year, sales reached 185,000. By 2016, as more manufacturers and retailers get into the electric bike market, Jamerson expects annual sales above 400,000. Within 20 years, he thinks the number could be as high as 2 million, and that the United States will be one of the top markets for electric bicycles in the world.
"We've got an ever-expanding population in the world that's moving more and more to denser and denser cities. Those cities require transportation solutions much more like a bicycle or an electric bicycle," says Benjamin. "The fact that the United States is transitioning a little bit slower than the rest of the world, I don’t see that as important. It's going to happen. It is happening. It will continue to happen."
There's certainly no shortage of manufacturers. There are nearly a hundred brands of electric bikes currently on the market. From Chinese manufacturers building millions of electric bikes a year to small garage-based startups, the supply side of electric bikes has developed rapidly over the past 20 years. And though Chinese manufacturers like Geoby are leading the global market, much of the U.S. market is led by three American companies: Pedego, Prodecotech, and Currie Technologies.
full article: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014...-to-hit-it-big-in-the-us-its-this-one/375167/
hills seem flat? Just ride your damn bike, life is not that serious
