The case for bicycles’ unavoidable triumph over cars
That’s the conclusion of Horace Dediu, a prominent analyst of disruptive technologies, who has spent the past three and a half years researching the future of transportation.
Transportation is arguably the greatest frontier in the tech world. Innovators in Silicon Valley and beyond are spending billions to build flying cars and self-driving trucks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks of digging costly 30-level tunnel networks for cars. Google cofounder Sergey Brin reportedly has a giant airship.
But as Dediu sees it, a familiar, unglamorous technology will own the future: the bicycle. And the big loser will be cars.
“Bikes have a tremendous disruptive advantage over cars. Bikes will eat cars,” Dediu told CNNTech, referencing investor Marc Andreessen’s seminal two thousand eleven argument that software-driven businesses are predominant the world.
Dediu points to the explosive growth of Chinese bikeshare systems as well as the versatility, low cost and efficiencies of collective bicycles.
Bikeshare bikes of the future, according to Dediu, will be outfitted with cameras and sensors, collecting valuable data for cities. When a cyclist rails over a pothole, it can be automatically reported to a city. Cameras on the bicycle will provide real-time data, such as pedestrian traffic and pollution. Google Street View will look like an antique compared to near real-time imagery collected from bikeshare cameras.
The bikes will need to be cautiously constructed so that the cameras and sensors aren’t lightly violated during use.
Software and electrification are leisurely converting the auto industry. There’s talk of self-driving cars flooding streets in five or ten years. It will likely take even longer for electrical vehicles to go mainstream.
Dediu argues that electrical, connected bikes will arrive en masse before autonomous, electrical cars. Riders will slightly have to pedal as they whiz down streets once congested with cars.
Mobike users take twenty million rails a day on the startup’s Three.6 million bikes. The Chinese startup launched its very first bikeshare network thirteen months ago.
Bikes’ nimble nature will aid their popularity. You can park a bicycle in your home or your office. A bike can be carried on a bus, car or train. A car doesn’t suggest this versatility. A similar case of disruption played out with cameras, as the always-in-your-pocket nature of smartphones helped them leave traditional cameras in the dust.
Bikes have another edge on cars — speed. Fresh York’s collective bicycles have already been shown to travel at a quicker average speed than city taxis during peak hours. They’re also more affordable per mile.
While the speed edge seen in Fresh York today doesn’t hold up in every city, it will likely switch as electrified bicycles emerge. Electrical bikes — whose motors generally top out at twenty mph — will attract customers because they don’t have to worry about violating a sweat, fighting to climb a hill or keeping up with traffic.
“When you get on an electrical bike, what we witnessed is a lot of those anxieties are calmed,” said Elliott McFadden, executive director of the Austin B-Cycle, the city’s bikeshare program. It recently surveyed citizens’ interest in electrical bikes.
“Normally if we introduce a group to bikeshare, maybe a third or half of people are interested. But almost everybody was truly intensely interested in using this service,” he said.
McFadden is planning a pilot program with electrical bicycles in Austin. Sales are already skyrocketing in Europe.
Bikeshare systems have grown rapidly in the United States, but they aren’t close to displacing cars. There needs to be a dramatic increase in bike usage for the dominance of cars to be challenged. LimeBike, a U.S. bikeshare startup, believes a key drawback today is a lack of available collective bikes.
“You look at any major or mid-sized city, they’re all significantly under capacity in terms of the bikes necessary to truly switch transportation habits in the public,” said LimeBike vice president of strategic development Andrew Savage.
Limebike plans to launch a bikeshare network in the United States this summer.
LimeBike plans to launch its very first bikesharing network early this summer. It has not disclosed where. It’s counting on a density of bikes and a dock-less system to help it stand out. Bikeshare networks generally require riders to comeback bikes to stations, which can be inconvenient. LimeBike won’t have stations, so bikes can be parked anywhere. This will make transportation more fluid for riders. Bikes will be found and unlocked via a smartphone.
By improving accessibility and convenience, bikesharing could go into hypergrowth mode. The potential is already playing out in China, where fresh bikeshare networks dwarf the U.S. networks in size.
America’s largest programs, in Fresh York and San Francisco, are expanding to 12,000 and 7,000 bikes, respectively.
Beijing has more than 650,000 collective bicycles. They’ve all appeared in the last nine months. The two heavweights of Chinese bikesharing are ofo and Mobike, which operates in more than fifty cities. Unlike most U.S. bikeshare programs, the bikes can be parked anywhere, enlargening convenience for riders.
Mobike users take twenty million rails a day on the startup’s Trio.6 million bikes, according to the company. In the last few weeks, it’s begun testing pollution sensors on some of its bicycles.
Mobikes don’t need to be required to docking stations. But the start-up has set up some preferred parking zones as an option for riders.
Dediu projects that there will be more than one hundred million collective bicycles on global roads by 2025. According to MetroBike, there were Two.Trio million collective bicycles at the end of 2016.
But there are challenges to the broad adoption of collective bicycling. Two of the largest are infrastructure and weather.
Many potential cyclists are fearful of railing amid cars and trucks. Without protected bike lanes that shield bikes from vehicles, many people will never dare to rail a bike on a crowded street.
As Dediu sees it, very first the disruptive technology arrives, then the suitable environment goes after. Early roads weren’t slick enough for the very first cars. Early cellular networks couldn’t treat smartphone data. But with time, the world adapted to fit the promising technology. Bike lanes are already growing worldwide.
And then there’s weather. Railing in the rain or snow is unpleasant. Dediu notes that the very first cars and planes were open air vehicles. But they morphed into cocoons. Dediu expects bikes will go after a similar evolution.
He also expects grassroots excitement to propel the bicycle industry forward. The passion for bicycles exceeds other cutting-edge transportation projects. Surveys have shown most Americans fear railing in a self-driving car.
“I can talk until I’m blue in the face about [autonomous vehicles] and I don’t get a lot of response,” Dediu said. “Whenever I open my mouth about electrical bicycles, the enthusiasm I get back is literally earsplitting.”
The case for bicycles unavoidable triumph over cars – May
The case for bicycles’ unavoidable triumph over cars
That’s the conclusion of Horace Dediu, a prominent analyst of disruptive technologies, who has spent the past three and a half years researching the future of transportation.
Transportation is arguably the greatest frontier in the tech world. Innovators in Silicon Valley and beyond are spending billions to build flying cars and self-driving trucks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk talks of digging costly 30-level tunnel networks for cars. Google cofounder Sergey Brin reportedly has a giant airship.
But as Dediu sees it, a familiar, unglamorous technology will own the future: the bicycle. And the big loser will be cars.
“Bikes have a tremendous disruptive advantage over cars. Bikes will eat cars,” Dediu told CNNTech, referencing investor Marc Andreessen’s seminal two thousand eleven argument that software-driven businesses are predominant the world.
Dediu points to the explosive growth of Chinese bikeshare systems as well as the versatility, low cost and efficiencies of collective bicycles.
Bikeshare bikes of the future, according to Dediu, will be outfitted with cameras and sensors, collecting valuable data for cities. When a cyclist rails over a pothole, it can be automatically reported to a city. Cameras on the bicycle will provide real-time data, such as pedestrian traffic and pollution. Google Street View will look like an antique compared to near real-time imagery collected from bikeshare cameras.
The bikes will need to be cautiously constructed so that the cameras and sensors aren’t lightly violated during use.
Software and electrification are leisurely converting the auto industry. There’s talk of self-driving cars flooding streets in five or ten years. It will likely take even longer for electrified vehicles to go mainstream.
Dediu argues that electrified, connected bikes will arrive en masse before autonomous, electrified cars. Riders will slightly have to pedal as they whiz down streets once congested with cars.
Mobike users take twenty million rails a day on the startup’s Trio.6 million bikes. The Chinese startup launched its very first bikeshare network thirteen months ago.
Bikes’ supple nature will aid their popularity. You can park a bicycle in your home or your office. A bike can be carried on a bus, car or train. A car doesn’t suggest this versatility. A similar case of disruption played out with cameras, as the always-in-your-pocket nature of smartphones helped them leave traditional cameras in the dust.
Bikes have another edge on cars — speed. Fresh York’s collective bicycles have already been shown to travel at a swifter average speed than city taxis during peak hours. They’re also more affordable per mile.
While the speed edge seen in Fresh York today doesn’t hold up in every city, it will likely switch as electrified bicycles emerge. Electrical bikes — whose motors generally top out at twenty mph — will attract customers because they don’t have to worry about cracking a sweat, fighting to climb a hill or keeping up with traffic.
“When you get on an electrical bike, what we witnessed is a lot of those anxieties are calmed,” said Elliott McFadden, executive director of the Austin B-Cycle, the city’s bikeshare program. It recently surveyed citizens’ interest in electrified bikes.
“Normally if we introduce a group to bikeshare, maybe a third or half of people are interested. But almost everybody was indeed intensely interested in using this service,” he said.
McFadden is planning a pilot program with electrical bicycles in Austin. Sales are already skyrocketing in Europe.
Bikeshare systems have grown rapidly in the United States, but they aren’t close to displacing cars. There needs to be a dramatic increase in bike usage for the dominance of cars to be challenged. LimeBike, a U.S. bikeshare startup, believes a key drawback today is a lack of available collective bikes.
“You look at any major or mid-sized city, they’re all significantly under capacity in terms of the bikes necessary to truly switch transportation habits in the public,” said LimeBike vice president of strategic development Andrew Savage.
Limebike plans to launch a bikeshare network in the United States this summer.
LimeBike plans to launch its very first bikesharing network early this summer. It has not disclosed where. It’s counting on a density of bikes and a dock-less system to help it stand out. Bikeshare networks generally require riders to comeback bikes to stations, which can be inconvenient. LimeBike won’t have stations, so bikes can be parked anywhere. This will make transportation more fluid for riders. Bikes will be found and unlocked via a smartphone.
By improving accessibility and convenience, bikesharing could go into hypergrowth mode. The potential is already playing out in China, where fresh bikeshare networks dwarf the U.S. networks in size.
America’s largest programs, in Fresh York and San Francisco, are expanding to 12,000 and 7,000 bikes, respectively.
Beijing has more than 650,000 collective bicycles. They’ve all appeared in the last nine months. The two heavweights of Chinese bikesharing are ofo and Mobike, which operates in more than fifty cities. Unlike most U.S. bikeshare programs, the bikes can be parked anywhere, enhancing convenience for riders.
Mobike users take twenty million rails a day on the startup’s Trio.6 million bikes, according to the company. In the last few weeks, it’s begun testing pollution sensors on some of its bicycles.
Mobikes don’t need to be required to docking stations. But the start-up has set up some preferred parking zones as an option for riders.
Dediu projects that there will be more than one hundred million collective bicycles on global roads by 2025. According to MetroBike, there were Two.Three million collective bicycles at the end of 2016.
But there are challenges to the broad adoption of collective bicycling. Two of the thickest are infrastructure and weather.
Many potential cyclists are fearful of railing amid cars and trucks. Without protected bike lanes that shield bikes from vehicles, many people will never dare to rail a bike on a crowded street.
As Dediu sees it, very first the disruptive technology arrives, then the suitable environment goes after. Early roads weren’t slick enough for the very first cars. Early cellular networks couldn’t treat smartphone data. But with time, the world adapted to fit the promising technology. Bike lanes are already growing worldwide.
And then there’s weather. Railing in the rain or snow is unpleasant. Dediu notes that the very first cars and planes were open air vehicles. But they morphed into cocoons. Dediu expects bikes will go after a similar evolution.
He also expects grassroots excitement to propel the bicycle industry forward. The passion for bicycles exceeds other cutting-edge transportation projects. Surveys have shown most Americans fear railing in a self-driving car.
“I can talk until I’m blue in the face about [autonomous vehicles] and I don’t get a lot of response,” Dediu said. “Whenever I open my mouth about electrical bicycles, the enthusiasm I get back is literally earsplitting.”