Filed under: Transportation Alternatives, On Two Wheels, Japan
Cool Japan: Fancy underground robot bike parking in Tokyo
If you think of a city full of bikes, your first though might be Amsterdam (which is packed with the two-wheelers, believe me) or a city in China. But Tokyo has its own great number of bike riders. In fact, 90 percent of Tokyo commuters use rail, and 30 percent of these also rely on a bicycle to reach their final destination. That's a lot of bikes, and finding a place to park all of them is starting to become a problem. One safe, eco-friendly and robotic solution has been found with a system of automated kiosks that park the bikes in an underground rotating storage wheel (check out the additional picture and video after the jump to see what we mean). The system uses membership cards that cost ¥2600 (about $29 or €21) a month.
[Source: DannyChoo via World Changing]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
meme 2:43PM (12/17/2008)
"In fact, 90 percent of Tokyo commuters use rail"
And I wouldn't be surprised if a good percentage of the rest walked. ;) Tokyo is an interesting city to visit. The whole time I was there, I rarely had an idea of just *where* I was. At least to a visitor, "North", "South", "East", and "West" rarely apply; instead, you disappear into a subway or onto a train and reappear in some other district without you having to understand where they are in relation to the city as a whole. No real "downtown", just an endless sprawling mass of city.
I saw a car equivalent of that bicycle parking thing while I was in... was it Matsumoto? I think it was. The guy fetching his car from it thought it was funny that I wanted to take a picture. ;)
Hey, anyone know if they make smaller versions of things like that which you can have in your home? I think that'd be an awesome home automation project to have a pantry that could fetch bins of items robotically. ;)
Reply
slk23 3:12PM (12/17/2008)
I lived in Paris for a year and after a few months of riding the Metro I switched to taking the bus whenever possible. It gave me a much better perspective on how the city is laid out and the distances between different places. Subways are great in their own way, but I much prefer seeing where I am.
Bicycling in Paris was also good, and a lot less intimidating than I expected.
Mike 8:26PM (12/17/2008)
Whats with the Nintendo subliminal graphic at 1:13?
Reply
Arnold Schneider 7:49AM (12/18/2008)
it says: Cats all your base are belong to us.
????
GenWaylaid 8:56PM (12/18/2008)
It would appear we have stumbled across a stratum of fossilized meme from 2001: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base
Cocoa Deluxe 9:55AM (12/18/2008)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qItugh-fFgg
Reply
Brn 10:31AM (12/18/2008)
Wow, that seems like an overly complex solution.
Reply
Michael Jennings 4:16PM (12/19/2008)
>No real "downtown", just an endless sprawling mass of city.
Tokyo is a group of towns and villages that have agglomerated together into a metropolis. London (where I live) is also like this. When I first came here I would simply ascend from the ground at my destination and not really learn how the bits of the city related to one another. However, I have made a point of walking around the city and riding around in buses to see how everything relates to everything else.
And, I have spent enough time in Tokyo to have at least done some of the same thing. I got a map, and walked between the various of central Tokyo. When you do this, you discover that Tokyo is a great city to walk around. Lost of interesting little alleys, fascinating shops, always somewhere to eat and drink, lots of great smells, sights and sounds. Do this a few times and you do get an idea of the layout of the city.
One thing that people go to Tokyo and often miss is that Tokyo is a harbour city. Tokyo Bay is actually very important to how the city is arranged and what goes where. It is easy to spend quite a while in Tokyo without even realising that it is there, but once you go for a walk along the waterfront, the city starts to make sense.
That was my experience, anyway.
Reply
zipnose! 5:53AM (1/05/2009)
Hello everyone, I am an engineering student from the Philippines, part of our requirements for technical writing is to have a mock project. Our group decided to fix a parking problem in one of our localities here. That robot parking lot seems to be a perfect fit for our mock project. My problem now is how to find information about that parking lot, maybe about the costs and designs for that parking lot... Kindly give me some links, preferably in English.. Is there a car version for this kind of parking lot? please mail me at pao_boinkyzip@yahoo.com
Reply