this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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Looks neat, and having everything fully enclosed is a good idea. If someone is already in the habit of exercising on a stationary bike (I'm not) it could be a great way to have a backup battery or create power savings
I heard about a concept like those for a gym powered by their stationary bikes, but the math just doesn’t work. A pro rider can put out about 2000 W for a short sprint, but about 300 W for an extended time. That 300 W works out to about 5¢ worth of electricity per hour of working out, or about $20 if a person averages that for an hour per day for a year. That $20/year has to be able to cover the cost of the added generator system in the bike, whatever battery/inverter system that’s storing the energy, and/or the interlock system to put that power into one’s electrical service.
It’s great if you want to power the electronics of the stationary bike, maybe with a USB port to power one’s phone/music player. Trying to offset electrical costs with human/animal labour is not going to be net positive except in very niche situations.
Bingo.
I feel like these are usually put out by some kind of art or design student who hasn’t taken enough physics courses. Sure it’s easy to say “well, you’re peddling anyways so why does it matter?” But at the end of the day making this bike over some simpler bike is never going to recoup the cost or energy required.
Hmm. That math sounds like it would be pretty okay for charging a phone, or saving up the energy over time to use as an emergency backup - assuming you are in an area with usually reliable power and short outages.
What’s the actual benefit there though? It costs about $0.001 to charge a cell phone, or about 10 charges per penny(if you’re somewhere that has pennies). UPS, and portable battery packs are already a thing, and the cost to charge them is a heck of a lot less than the cost of adding a dynamo to an exercise bike.
Honestly, even if the argument is some niche case like being able to power some emergency system in an off-grid setup or power outage, you’re probably much better off just putting up a small scale solar system. Another way to look at it: a food calorie costs about $0.05 on average, or $43/kWh, compared to $0.15/kWh for electricity through a utility. That’s a lot of food that needs to be stored to give a person the energy to run that bike.
This kind of thing just doesn’t make sense financially or environmentally. If the idea is to promote sustainability, this has the exact opposite effect of using resources to build something that’s never going to produce as much energy as it took to build in the first place. Even if a person is going to be using a stationary bike either way, the system needed to capture and store that energy isn’t going to ever going to capture as much energy as was spent to make it.
I don't think there is a financial, environmental, or logical reason for this thing to exist. It would come down to "it's neat" or "it motivates me" or some excuse like that. I would not advocate for people to get one, I can just see how someone would smugly refer to it as an upgrade from their Peleton.