Japanese bicycle parking tower aches with hunger
With frightening velocipedal hunger, this Tokyo Bicycle Parking Tower gobbles up bicycles with speed and relish. It will store up to 9,400 bikes in its belly, and will only regurgitate your ten speed for a shiny 100 yen coin. The Bicycle Parking Tower's inner workings are less Rube Goldberg than I'd imagined, but there's still something remarkably disconcerting about the claustrophobic vastness of its bowels and the ruthless efficiency of its automation. One hundred years from now, we'll all pop a buck into a control panel at the end of the day and automatically be whisked away to our hibernation coffins by vast, skyscraper-sized machines exactly like this.
tokyo bicycle parking tower [YouTube via Engadget]
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I love Japan. I saw something similar gobbling up subcompacts in Tokyo. Nom nom nom.
Oh, and you should get some sort of gold-plated statue for writing the phrase "velocipedal hunger."
I can't wait for the 22nd century to reach us.
As with many things here, bike parking of all types is "one size fits all". If you dont have one of the standard "mama chari" bikes, you cant use this or pretty much any of the legal bike parking due to wheel size or wheelbase length. Ride a beach cruiser? Wheels too fat to fit. Stingray or Spoiler? Too long and back wheel too fat. Etc. etc. etc.
This reminds me of the Matrix.
I always balked at paying for bicycle parking, and would scout out free alternatives.
Part of the fun was guessing how close to the train station you could get without getting towed. If I noticed that bikes had been taken in the last day or two, or if it was likely to rain all day, I could park within a minute's walk. I got nabbed just once in 15 years.
#3: I take it you are reporting actual experience, from Japan? I wondered when I saw this, are bikes more standardized there, or does the robot handle more varied bikes than it looked like? Or are there just enough "standard" bikes to make it worthwhile?
My bike would probably fit dimension-wise, but alas: I have hacked up an obscure pre-deraileur gearing scheme which prevents it rolling backward.
I am in fact a resident of Japan with a non standard bicycle. 99.9% of the bikes here are the type shown in the cue frame of the video, most of the remaining ones are mountain bikes or foldup bikes. Non standard design bicycles are rare probably because most people dont ride for fun, they just ride from home to the supermarket or to the train station (usually while yapping or texting away on their mobile phones)
That's fricken sweet. Pity it wouldn't work with my trike, though. Why do I gotta be different?