Reinventing the wheel: new tech turns regular bikes into hybrids – and a traffic tool

In the past decade or so, bicycles have taken western cities by storm. London has introduced both bike-sharing and bike lanes, and Paris even has a bike-sharing programme for children. In Copenhagen, ever the bicycle champion, 41% of rides to work and education now take place on bicycle seats. But what if you’re not super fit, don’t want to arrive at work sweaty, or if you simply live far from your job? A new hybrid “e-bike” promises to fix that dilemma.

To be precise, the Copenhagen Wheel is not truly an e-bike at all. It’s a wheel that can be attached to a regular bike. That wheel, equipped with a motor, batteries, sensors and wireless connectivity, transforms the bike into a smart bike that multiplies pedal power and even measures the rider’s heart rate and monitors potholes. “The experience is very natural,” claims Assaf Biderman, associate director of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, which developed the Copenhagen Wheel, and CEO of Superpedestrian, the startup that makes the wheel. “You can essentially ride as far as you like.”

The MIT team came up with the idea behind the Copenhagen Wheel not because they were looking to improve bikes but because they were trying to solve an urgent problem: traffic in the world’s fast-growing cities. “The car is not going to go away,” explains Biderman. “We realised that the bike is the best solution if we allow it to become more like a car.” Indeed, the MIT team worked with a range of cities in developing solutions for urban infrastructure, but decided that this concept – developed in conjunction with Copenhagen city planners – had the most obvious consumer-market potential.

The Copenhagen Wheel, which can be pre-ordered online and will go on the market later this year, adds a smart twist to the traditional e-bike: power assist; brakes that store energy; and algorithms that help the bike understand when the rider pedals harder, allowing the wheel to push with more power.

New York-based company FlyKly makes a similar wheel, the Smart Wheel, available for pre-order since October. “The smart thing is the most interesting aspect about these bikes,” says Esben Alslund-Lanthén, a research analyst at Danish sustainability think tank Sustainia. “Copenhagen isn’t hilly, but it’s windy. The smart aspect makes biking much more convenient. And cyclists in hilly cities like San Francisco can really benefit from it.”

Granted, when the traditional e-bike was developed, such bells and whistles were simply not possible. Digital technology, Biderman says, has come to the aid of urban transportation: “Thanks to digital devices, there’s a feedback loop between us and the environment around us. We asked ourselves: “how can we use that feedback loop to help improve the urban environment?’”

SENSEable City Lab’s answer is to use the same sensors that measure the rider’s activity to also survey the environment around them. If used on a large scale, and assuming riders give their consent, such data showing both urban traffic activity and road passages in need of repair can be collected and evaluated by city planners. The humble bike, in other words, stands to become an important piece of urban infrastructure.

That, Biderman says, makes the Copenhagen Wheel especially useful for cities such as Lagos, Nigeria, or Nairobi, Kenya, that until now haven’t closely monitored their traffic patterns. He predicts the Copenhagen Wheel could become the transportation equivalent of the mobile phone in developing countries: “They leapfrogged the west in going straight to mobile phones, skipping landlines altogether. The same thing could happen in urban mobility, with people opting for the Copenhagen Wheel rather than taking the traditional first step of buying a car.”

Smart bikes may, if widely adopted, also change the way we think about urban transportation, turning it from a utilitarian process that’s often a waste of time into an activity with wellness potential – without the sweaty office arrival. In Copenhagen, Alslund-Lanthén notes, city agencies already use e-bikes as a way of getting staff around the city faster while helping them get healthier.

There’s only one thing: where to park the wheel? The Copenhagen Wheel and FlyKly’s Smart Wheel aren’t cheap, at $799 and $800 (£505), respectively. Although they can be locked electronically, Alslund-Lanthén also advises “locking it to something really solid”.

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