Japan Bicycle Parking Technology [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7juWamiWY

by ekianjo • 11 years ago

67 49 11 years ago

youtube.com

ekianjo4• 11 years ago

Note for those not living in Japan. It's not everywhere like that :)

shawnps2• 11 years ago

I'm in Tokyo and I've never seen one before :) but I might start looking just to try it out.

ekianjo4• 11 years ago

In Osaka the standard is just to drop your bicycle on the side of the street, to the point that people can't walk anymore on that side :P

snogglethorpe• 11 years ago

I think in most areas of Tokyo these things really aren't necessary, despite the high popularity of bicycle transport, because bicycle parking is fairly simple to cram in various nooks and crannies (lots of bike parking underneath train viaducts), and bikes are more popular in more less dense (suburban, outlying) areas than in the densest parts of the city core, which means there's usually a bit more space available too.

When you're going to do major construction anyway, you may as well build a human-accessible bike-parking structure or underground bike-parking area, which can probably be equally dense, and are almost certainly less of a maintenance burden.

The main advantage of robo-parking seems to be that it lets them use a very vertical space, which wouldn't work so well with "manual" bike parking.

shawnps2• 11 years ago

Danny Choo did a post on this: http://www.dannychoo.com/en/post/26963/Japan+Underground+Bic...

Looks like you can find one of these in Shinagawa

dogma1138• 11 years ago

From what i can tell i think it's actually the only one, been to Japan several times since these were initially posted online and I've never seen them, or any other type of an automated bike storage service.

Heck from what i can tell all the pictures and video seem to cover exactly the same bike storage, and for some odd reason it's always empty when they film it. While it's a nice idea i think it's way too impractical.

This seems to be less dense than what turns out of most traditional bike parking systems, it's also much more expensive to build and maintain, and i don't even want to start thinking of how easy for it to just get stuck, miss read the tag on your bike, or heck for that RFID tag to simply just die / fall off during storage.

If you use something like a Santa Cruz racing frame with every part made out of carbon to commute to work, yeah the extra security is probably worth the costs when you deal with 10K$+ bikes, but as far as most commuting bikes I've seen in Japan and Asia in general nope, they aren't worth it.

w00kie• 11 years ago

I know a couple in Tokyo: one in Shinagawa (the Danny Choo one), one in Roppongi. The one is this video is a different one.

This is a company that makes such systems: http://cycle-tree.jp/ They have more examples of installations.

ProZsolt• 11 years ago

If you watch the camera's footage that mounted on the bike, you can see there are several bikes in the storage.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

The Dutch low-tech but ugly equivalent:

http://www.citi.io/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/483-3.jpg

lucb1e2• 11 years ago

That's not stacked though, I think this comes closer to an "equivalent":

http://www.haldo.com/images/CYCLE%20SHELTERS/optima-1-640.jp... (source: http://www.haldo.com/optima.php )

Edit: Lol, HN replaces ".jpg" with ".jp...". So much for shortening the link.

gkop• 11 years ago

Yes, this is similar to what BART uses: http://sf.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2012/05...

aaron6952• 11 years ago

http://www.copenhagenize.com/2015/02/worlds-first-automated-...

ygra2• 11 years ago

Japan has very little space to devote for such things. Such a solution won't work or scale there.

IkmoIkmo3• 11 years ago

We don't either :P And we have twice the per capita rate of bicycles compared to Japan. The current projects are virtually all underground, but there's no real need to automate it necessarily. See the other posts in this comment thread about stacking bikes easily, and taking your bike down some stairs or up with a conveyer belt. It's quite space efficient, easy to build, very low maintenance, open to many different types of bikes etc.

adregan• 11 years ago

Japan is space constrained, but not _that_ space constrained. Here's a similar bike lot in Nakano, Tokyo:

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.70675,139.663513,3a,75y,197....

lindig3• 11 years ago

What are the economics of this? The student rate is about $10/month which seems worth it given that your bike is safe and dry. But how long would it take to recoup just the cost to build something like this? Just for comparison, a conventional parking spot in a car parking garage (with no robotic access) costs about $15.000 or $500/m^2 for the building.

aaron6952• 11 years ago

Pretty sure it's only possible because of the way the Japanese subsidise things so much. I think building down is generally as expensive as building up.

Could be $1.5 million per 200 bikes -

http://www.therecord.com/news-story/3901727-a-gateway-to-und...

lindig3• 11 years ago

That would mean about $7500 per bike or half as much as a conventional parking garage costs per car. There is no way this can be operated profitably at $10/month/bike or even $20/month/bike as it would take 30+ years to recoup the costs before running costs.

IshKebab• 11 years ago

Yeah that thing looks insanely expensive. Also what happens when it inevitably goes wrong (e.g. someone leaves pannier bag on their bike and it gets snagged)?

It's seriously cool though. Someone must have had fun designing it!

kalleboo2• 11 years ago

It could also be owned or subsidized by the train company if it gets more people to commute and buy expensive train passes (land around train stations is extremely valuable for retail already)

rasur• 11 years ago

I'm sure the end of the video shows the doors closing on the front wheel of the bike!

fredsted• 11 years ago

It's at the same position as when the video started.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

Also, watching the bike back up; you wouldn't want to fall in this. http://fitsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/sarlaac.jpg

joosters• 11 years ago

I'd love to know the reliability rate of the system. If just one bike jams up or falls over during the loading/unloading, everyone's bikes become completely inaccessible.

Maybe it works flawlessly, but it looks so fragile to me.

tim333• 11 years ago

Cool eh? I think the Japanese have a culture for this stuff. It reminds me off about 30 years ago I visited a Toyota engine making plant in Nagoya and it was unremarkable apart from there being almost no people on the line. Just engine parts trundling from one machine to another on automated conveyers. I don't think there was much computer control - it was pretty much mechanical mechanisms.

kalleboo2• 11 years ago

Japan is very much a land of contrasts. You have things like this and their precision manufacturing. And then you enter an office and you're caught in a whirlwind of paper and faxes. And don't get me started on their banking. ATMS with opening hours...

ekianjo4• 11 years ago

ATMS with opening hours...

Yeah, ATMs closing during the evenings and holidays! This kind of things has pissed me off more than once, but it's getting slightly better nowadays.

The office situation is pretty much like you described, and faxes are still very much in use everywhere. Stuck in the 70s.

branchless• 11 years ago

Or the guys with umbrellas making sure you don't get splashed by the guy washing the window once story up. Or the guy with a glow-stick warding you away from walking into an already signed road/pavement repair.

It's odd - we don't even need robots for these jobs, they are simply pointless. Perhaps they are made possible by large-scale underemployment due to automation in other areas.

w1ntermute• 11 years ago

there being almost no people on the line

That's no longer the case: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-06/humans-rep...

IkmoIkmo3• 11 years ago

Throughput is not really mentioned here, which is the key bottleneck I think.

Nobody really has huge issues parking their bike at home. Humans are sufficiently spread out around a city, and so bike density is similar to human density, which is not that bad.

The problem areas for storage solutions for bikes is at areas with very high density. Here in the Netherlands that's the train stations. At the Central Station of big cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam, hundreds of thousands of people pass every day, relatively small areas. Many of those arrive or leave by bike. Storing those bikes is tricky, not only because of space concerns, but also because the vast majority of people (probably 80%) arrive/leave during two periods of about 90 minutes of peek travel time in the morning and evening.

In other words at any one point during those periods, you have hundreds of people storing or retrieving their bicycle at the same time.

That is totally incompatible it seems with this device, which retrieves at most 2 bikes or so per minute. A person has to walk up, enter his card, his password, then the device has to do some stuff, then he has to retrieve it from the device, walk away.

Compare storing your bicycle at a train station for example with buying train tickets. At the Central Station you'll easily find dozens and dozens of machines to buy a ticket, and lots of booths to do so as well, and still you see rows of people at peek times. Even after we've had subscription based tickets for decades (e.g. take any train and pay x per year) and card based systems (if the balance on your card drops below $10 it can get automatically refilled. Just swipe your card to enter the train) for years which means most travellers don't even need to purchase a ticket.

So you'd need quite a lot of these machines and I don't really see how that'd make economic sense. We've had a lot of good experiences with manual underground, cheap, low-maintenance facilities now that are a better alternative. And for low-throughput areas, storage of bicycles isn't a very big issue, meaning the economics (premium price, no doubt) make even less sense when there are plenty of free storage opportunities (on the street).

For certain bikes it makes sense (those costing $10k). But that's not the norm in countries with high per-capita rates of bikes. I and everyone I know have had bikes costing at most 200, I tend to buy them for 80 or so second hand with 20 of annual maintenance. I can store it infront of my house just fine, it's never a problem. The rate of theft means it's cheaper to buy a new one / insure the bike for a fraction of its cost, than to pay $100+ a year for storage like this (and even that rate is unlikely to be profitable for this facility). And at the central station where it is hard to park a bike without adequate facilities, retrieval would be too slow, and manual underground facilities are fine.

lordnacho• 11 years ago

Am I missing something here? Don't you have to dig a massive hole for this to work? Why not a tower that sticks up instead?

lotu• 11 years ago

You don't want a massive tower in the middle of the street. It interferes with traffic.

Japan Bicycle Parking Technology [video]

Related Stories