BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The smartphone app funded by the industry’s Bike Hub levy is one of many tech innovations featured in ‘Sense and the City’, an exhibition about the future of cities, now open at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden.
The museum held an open evening last night for contributors to the exhibition. The Bike Hub smartphone app – available for Android devices and iPhones – is highlighted as an innovation from the future, but available now.
The app is the world’s first cycle-specific satnav and can route cyclists on bike paths. It was created to show newbie and hesitant cyclists that it’s not necessary to ride on busy roads. The app also pinpoints bike shops close to the smartphone user.
In the exhibition, the Bike Hub app is displayed via pop-up graphics on a table-top touchscreen. Pix here.
‘Sense and the City’ makes the prediction that by 2050, 80 percent of Londoners will walk or cycle to work. Featuring previous predictions of futuristic cities, the exhibition shows that intelligent transport planning is far more likely to deliver urban travel time gains than hoverboards, personal helicopters or aerial tramways.
With an animation of Boris Bike journey flows and a speedometer showing average car speeds in London (even off-peak, cars can’t manage anything above 17mph and in peak times are usually much slower), the exhibition is hoping to use data to show how transport choices can make – or break – ga city.
Exhibition curator Stephen Feber said: “In the future, the best connected cities will win out.”
But he said ‘best connected’ didn’t necessarily mean more roads or rails – space in cities is not infinite – it could just as easily mean information technology.
The exhibition runs until March 2012.
