Each day in Tokyo, over 700,000 people ride their bikes to catch the morning train and this creates a problem. Where do you store all those bikes? Well, thanks to Japanese ingenuity and their skills in robotics, they’ve come up with a robot that quickly and efficiently parks them in underground storage facilities (see video below – in English).
This implementation in Edogawa, Japan was built at a cost of $67 million and can store up to 9,400 bikes at one time. The method uses an RFID tag to identify your bike and costs only $18 a month to use. The system keeps your bike safe without the need for locks and chains and better still, takes as little as 10 seconds to deposit or retrieve your bike from one of the 36 kiosks.
Yet another reason to move to Japan. Check out the bot in action below.
Sources:
Washington Post via BotJunkie
transit stations « i heart hawaii says:
August 20th, 2009 at 10:30 am
[...] has found some great alternatives to serve large volumes of cyclists with the subterranean bicycle parking towers. at $67m this is not viable for us, but we also don’t have 700,000 people cycling to work [...]