Two Feet, One Rail, and a Million Dollars

The sight of gridlock stretching ahead for miles turns a driver to fantasies of flight—if only the car would sprout wings, or the jet-pack had been properly invented, or a CH-47D Chinook helicopter would arrive and transport the vehicle to more sparsely populated roads.

For Geoff Barnett, the sight of gridlock turned his mind to bicycles.

Not interweaving through traffic, messenger style, but flying above. Flying, that is, not with wings, but attached to a monorail. To most, such a vision might flit about the neurons for a while before going the way of the other gridlock escape fantasies above.

Not for Barnett.

Subsequent to having his vision—while working as an educator in traffic-plagued Tokyo—Barnett decided to drop his career and pursue his growing monomania instead. He moved back to his native Australia, learned to weld and to work metal, and began shopping his idea to investors.

Six years after his initial vision, the pedal-powered monorail became a reality, albeit not (yet) the traffic skirting skyscraper-to-skyscraper mass transit panacea of which he had dreamed.

A prototype has now been test driven by tens of thousands in the Agroventures Adventure Park in New Zealand. It’s named Shweeb, after a German hanging monorail called the Schwebebahn.

In September 2010, Google announced the Shweeb monorail was one of five world-changing ideas to win Google’s "Project 10^100."  Google awarded Shweeb $1 million to help them turn the human-powered roller coaster into something more in keeping with Barnett’s dream.

The Naysayers

Though the money was the lowest of the amounts awarded, certain members of the media raked Google and Shweeb over the rails, “probably because the idea is unconventional,” notes Peter Cossey, Shweeb’s managing irector.  

“Why did Google bet $1 million on Shweeb?” asked one CNN headline. “Quite simply, Google must have gotten 149,996 stupid suggestions for this to have gotten funding,” wrote Wired’s Ryan Signal, after snarking that the company is “appropriately called Shweeb.”

Similarly, Luca Oprea of Gadget Review asked, “Isn’t the advantage of bicycles the ease with which you can maneuver to your destination?”

Aside from being just plain old stodgy, these naysayers have two primary complaints. The first is that no one would want to climb into a sealed pod that had been sweat upon by a previous rider. The second was that, given the fact that all pods would travel on just one track (you know the “mono” part), a single slow poke could make a whole line of pedalers seriously late to work.

But both these potential problems are, to some degree, dealt with in Shweeb’s blueprint for the future. The pods are not sealed sweatboxes, but ventilated. Riders are not likely to sweat any more than they would while walking (or riding in certain subway cars)—they need half as much horsepower to go the same speed as that of a land-bound bicycle.  (They can also go as fast as 43 miles per hour.)

And plans for a monorailed metropolis include a station that would sanitize pods as riders disembark.

As for the slow poke in the single lane problem, it is not a new one to mass transit, as anyone who’s ridden the subway or even driven on a two-lane highway can tell you.

Still, the Shweebians have plans for that as well. Inside each bike will be a switch for riders to turn their pods onto branch lines. They could also exit onto viewing platforms, allowing speed demons to pass.

But to focus on this problem is to ignore the profits of collaboration for pedalers of the Shweeb. When one pod gets behind another, they can essentially race as one, increasing power and decreasing drag. Where there were two headwinds and two vacuums, together there would be only one of each, but four legs to do the pumping.

Yes, were the Shweeb to take off, it would mean traveling in a way we’re not used to, but hasn’t that been true of every new vehicle that’s gained mass acceptance?

And anyway, what’s a million bucks to Google these days? The detractors may be right about the name, though.

Michael Abrams is an independent writer.

 

In September 2010, Google announced that Shweeb’s monorail was one of five world-changing ideas to win Google’s “Project 10^100".