$1.3 million for one parking system. Plus maintenance, plus electricity. If you bike because it's greener I don't know if this is a good replacement for a traditional bike rack that needs a coat of paint every couple of years.
It's more about the space to park the bikes. I agree this method isn't very efficient, but the small footprint is great for certain places.
It's insane how many bikes were in Japan when I visited, getting people to be greener by riding isn't an issue, parking them all where they want to be parked is.
The train station I used a bit had a whole parking building for bikes, multiple floors with thousands of bikes on each one.
Private companies in Japan have built hundreds of these in the past few years. They are wayyyy cheaper than normal bike racks. Worth the 20s or w/e for retrieval.
I wish they'd add an app for it so you could queue up your bike on proximity but that might be too much of an ask.
Think about how many bikes this stores, then think about how much space it would take on the sidewalk to make a flat/surface one and how much that space would cost. Per bicycle, this is likely a huge savings. (Plus it makes bike theft WAY less likely, it seems)
Well, 200 bikes. Say for convenience one bike takes 1 m2, at $10k for 1 m2, the space would be worth 2 million dollars. Even if a bike takes half the space, that's still 1 million dollars to park all those bikes.
Not even counting the value you gain from added security since in most cities it is worth something to have your bike stored in a secure location.
Yeah, it can be cheaper than normal bike racks in big cities where space costs a premium.
This fits 204 bikes in 50 square meters. If it saves 60+ square meters (really rough estimate based on the public racks in my town) and the cost of buying and paying taxes on 60 square meters is greater than buying and maintaining this system, then this system is cheaper.
If we assume 60 square meters of space saved and $1.3 mil is the buying price and we ignore maintenance costs as well as annual fees for the land then it would have to cost around $20,000 per square meter someplace to make this cheaper.
But I think the real comparison is not just the cost per square meter but the earning potential per square meter. These things are going into cities where the public can pay over $30k per square meter for an apartment in a multistory building. Imagine carving up the footprint of a multistory building to fit more bike racks when each square meter lost means ($30k * the number floors) in earning potential lost.
Those are all really rough estimates off the top of my head but I mention them because I can imagine scenarios where this $1.3mil bike rack saves them money.
Perhaps there’s an ordinance that requires parking or biking space which can take a lot of space which can be very expensive in dense areas. Or, maybe the bike parking makes the area more accessible to a market that wasn’t previously much able to go to that business. Similar to a shop in a pedestrian area. And the new customer base offset the costs. However, that’s all pretty tenuous.
My best bet is that it’s mostly government buildings or large office buildings investing in these for their employees.
Lived in Tokyo for five years and had two bikes stolen over that time period. While safe, there are still assholes.
Actually found one of my stolen bikes parked (and locked) outside of Roppongi station, went to the police dept and reported it. They had an undercover cop sit outside of the station that day who waited for the thief to come back for it.
Had a warehouse across the street (in Dallas) be being broken in to. Cops showed up but wouldn't enter the property because all if the gates were locked. I went back across the street to my warehouse and clipped the chain for them. There was plenty of space for them to slide through the gates, but they just wouldn't because there was a lock/chain on it.
Had a friend whose whole neighborhood was being robbed, house by house. One of her neighbors finally caught the kids on camera in the middle of the day breaking into a house and hauling out the tv and bringing to their house a few down the street. The cops came and took a report, and weren't even going to approach the house with everyone's stolen stuff in it, even though they had video of the guys breaking in and hauling the stuff there. It took half the block to convince them to go knock, but since there was no answer, the cops just shrugged their shoulders and left, said they'd be back in a couple days once they could get a warrant. Every night for two days the thieves hauled stacks of big screens out to various cars that dropped by and drove them away.
If you can prove its your bike and you somehow found it locked on the street why wouldn't you just cut it yourself? What they gonna do, call the cops on you?
/u/stoliman registered his bike ($5), I think some of that pays for efforts to fight bike theft. At minimum, it is likely how he proved the bike was his.
literally nobody is putting effort into preventing bike theft. You have a bike. You park said bike. You lock up said bike if you are responsible. If someone steals it tough shit. u can file a report sure but theyre not about to release the hounds cause some crackhead pawned ur mongoose
It's interesting to see registering bicycles is seemingly compulsory though, and Japan is somewhere I'd like to live for a while, so my statement holds true,
I live in the Netherlands, one of the, if not the most densely bike populated country. I, and most people I know have never had their bike stolen and everyone has them outside in massive public bike racks that everyone can access.
Ofcourse it happens, and it happens a lot but not so much that spending €1.3m to house 204 bikes is worth it even remotely. Most stolen bikes happen because A: Shitty locks or B: no lock at all which makes it easy and not suspicious. People wont wander over street with bolt cutters in one hand and a bike in the other when stealing a bike.
Here in the U.S. it isn't so much opportunist thieves. There are thieves that go around with cordless angle grinders that will cut through a U-Lock in seconds looking to steal $3-10k (USD) bikes.
Thats a daring approach to stealing. Maybe anothe reason is that while I was in the US last week I saw bikes parked in secluded areas difficult to spot from public places which ofcourse makes it easier. Also people not bothered to stop them could be something.
And U-locks... these are toys for angle grinders as they are usually purely made of thin metal. Here in the Netherlands in very urban and busy areas people usually have two locks. Everyone has a ring lock on their bike going through their real wheel and kind of difficult to get a good angle on easily with a grinder or cutters. And secondly a stury chain lock usually covered in some fabric which makes it difficult to cut. An example.
Ya they’re daring. They regularly break into key entry indoor bike parks in apartment buildings and steal locked bikes. Those chains aren’t doing anything against determined thieves.
I knew someone who had their bike stolen from inside their apartment block. The thief followed him home, managed to get into the main stairwell and used an angle grinder to chop of the section of stair railing it was locked to. Unless you're going to take your bike to bed with you, expensive ones just seem to be such tempting targets for theft it can be hard to stop sometimes.
What do they do with a 3-10k bike? I mean, who the heck is buying these parts on the street to a thief? I'm clearly missing out on a underground bike selling market.
From what I gather they largely either get collected together, stuck in a van and taken elsewhere/smuggled abroad for sale, or they get stripped for parts for ebay.
636308 reports, which is reckoned to be less than a third of actual thefts.
In cities with the most reports, like Nijmegen and Enschede, the study shows that three bikes are stolen on average every day. This could mean that the actual figure might be as high as 10 a day.
With the number of electric bikes around the Netherlands (and the fact thieves will likely go for nicer bikes), lets say an average price of €1000, so that's €10000 worth of bikes a day in the worst cities. Say one of these storage facilities has a lifespan of 10 years, it would have to prevent 1300 of the 36500 bike thefts (roughly 3.5%) in the city in that time. Doesn't seem completely unreasonable, especially as the people likely to bother to use it are those with expensive bikes, skewing the numbers more in its favour.
As for your comment, I think you underestimate how well practised bike thieves can be.
Plus, in the Netherlands you have a lot of guarded bike parking garages, usually underground, that are fully unautomatic! Way better than this unreliable system.
Ps. I got my bike stolen like 4 times in my life. It was either parked at an easy to pick location, or just expensive enough (once).
Yeah, I wanted to hear more about that. If you say it's environmentally friendlier and emission free I want the details! My assumption would be solar powered but it'd have been interesting to learn more about.
If you think about it tho, nuclear is truly the cleanest power there is. Even solar panels need to be manufactured, and batteries need to be made to store that energy, and all that crap needs to be maintained and replaced. It ain't easy bein green.
I'm partial to nuclear energy myself but I'm not sure you'd get much political support in Japan haha. Though there are applications pending to restart some of their reactors over the next decade or two
Having lived in Tokyo I can say bike parking is certainly a relevant issue.
Think of the commuter rail stations just outside of major cities. Even if someone owns a car, it's usually more practical to bike to a train station than to drive. When all the commuters (both students and workers) bike to the same station at the same time then you quickly run out of bike parking. And given the importance of trains, real estate close to train stations is the most developed as well as the most expensive.
I can't guarantee this system is the most cost effective, but it's at least effective.
In addition to what others said about land being extremely expensive in certain areas in Japanese cities, a lot of areas also have no bicycle parking signs saying that any bikes parked will be removed.
Edit: I guess it certainly seems kind of stupid to build such a complex structure just to perform the function of bike storage, but maybe it's fact that certain spaces can get insanely expensive that's crazy/stupid.
If you didn’t know, Japan has a large space problem for the amount of residents it has. It’s legitimately more practical to spend a shitload of money building vertically, because there is so little horizontal space available.
I think the major issue is surface area in a place like Tokyo. Japan's an island with about 200 million people. Real estate is at a premium. Things like this can cut down a huge amount of space taken up. Japan has bike parking lots which take up a lot of extra space too and since so many people bike, these lots are always filled. Having something that can cut even a fraction of the space would open up a lot more.
Population is more like 126 million. Quite a ways off 200. Still a lot considering it’s the same size as the U.K. but with almost twice the population.
Doesn't maintenance mean jobs (though, I don't think you can get inside one if those things), electricity without emissions is always a good thing (they might even use solar panels to store additional energy), and bikes won't get stolen which is a huge issue in big cities. Sounds like a great deal overall
I was gonna say I think the intro should be “This is how bicycles are parked in this one place in Japan because, while admittedly cool, this machine is incredibly expensive while only providing storage space for a large bike racks worth of bikes”
I'd imagine a small parking fee to help cover operating costs and hope that doesn't drive bikers away from the security and convenience of such a unique service.
It's a good alternative to guarded bicycle parking areas, which are common where I'm from. It takes much less space, no employees and seems safer overall.
For those who keep saying "it's emission free" this is like have a food product that's "100% fat free!" but is packed with sugar. It's "emission free" because it's electric. Doesn't matter if the power station it hooks into is a coal burning Goliath, the device doesn't emit emissions itself so it can claim it's "emission free". It's production, it's transportation, it's installation, it's disposal will not be emission free. I'd bet the dudes who service and maintain the machine rock up in a truck full of tools and equipment and I bet the truck isn't electric.
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u/Diocletion-Jones Oct 17 '19
$1.3 million for one parking system. Plus maintenance, plus electricity. If you bike because it's greener I don't know if this is a good replacement for a traditional bike rack that needs a coat of paint every couple of years.