h a l f b a k e r yBirth of a Notion.
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Where a city provides bicycles for getting around (London's Boris Bikes being the example I have in mind) these need bike racks. What if the rack is full?
Instead of this, let's provide each bike with a guide / support for a front wheel on its rear rack. Now you can simply ride up to the bike rack,
find the rearmost bike in the stack, and stack your bike up on it. It's a version of the way shopping trolleys are nested for storage.
A bike rack would then be nothing more complicated than a single post in the ground with a slot for the front wheel of the first bike on it.
For improved stability, each bike could have a kickstand with one position for supporting it normally and one for supporting it when the front wheel is stacked up.
Bike rack would need to be oriented such that the queue of bikes grew along the pavement rather than across the street. There might need to be a barrier to limit the total length of the queue and avoid the adjacent butcher's shop door being blocked overnight by an influx of bikes.
Assuming each bike was secured to the one in front of it, some means of coping with broken bikes would be required - it's no good having twenty bikes in the rack if you can only choose one of them and it has a flat tyre.
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In racks of shopping carts (trolleys) I notice that the most useless ones seem to be the first on offer. People select one that works well, but leave behind the junk. And it builds up. |
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Bad bikes will likely move to the same blocking position in your chain gang of bikes.. |
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//People select one that works well, but leave behind the
junk. And it builds up.// |
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Heh, now you come to mention it... I select the closest
cart/trolley and just get on with it, no wonder I spend 74%
of my entire physical capability fighting against a device
that desperately wants to pivot around it's one completely
dysfunctional wheel. It's practically all the exercise I get. |
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// It's practically all the exercise I get. // |
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Didn't have you down as a fitness fanatic ... every day, something new
... |
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As to the idea ... you might manage this with a moped or a scooter,
but anything over 125cc is going to be mighty heavy to lift ... |
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From a space perspective it probably makes sense to have
the rack mount to the front fork (fold down?), such that the
bikes end up in sort of an echelon down the street. |
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Perhaps the broken bike problem could be addressed by having two queues of bikes emerging from the rack - one for healthy bikes stretching down the street to the left, and a shorter one for broken bikes stretching up the street to the right. |
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A bike could then be unlocked from one end of the healthy queue, found to be faulty, locked to the end of the broken queue and a healthy bike chosen in its place. |
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