

Japan Bicycle Parking Technology [video] - ekianjo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7juWamiWY

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tim333
Cool eh? I think the Japanese have a culture for this stuff. It reminds me off
about 30 years ago I visited a Toyota engine making plant in Nagoya and it was
unremarkable apart from there being almost no people on the line. Just engine
parts trundling from one machine to another on automated conveyers. I don't
think there was much computer control - it was pretty much mechanical
mechanisms.

~~~
kalleboo
Japan is very much a land of contrasts. You have things like this and their
precision manufacturing. And then you enter an office and you're caught in a
whirlwind of paper and faxes. And don't get me started on their banking. ATMS
with opening hours...

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ekianjo
> ATMS with opening hours...

Yeah, ATMs closing during the evenings and holidays! This kind of things has
pissed me off more than once, but it's getting slightly better nowadays.

The office situation is pretty much like you described, and faxes are still
very much in use everywhere. Stuck in the 70s.

~~~
oh_sigh
Do you know the reason for that? It takes more effort to program a machine to
turn off during certain hours than it does to just let it run 24/7, so someone
must have thought there was a compelling reason to disallow it. Maybe to
prevent drunk people from overdrawing their account on horrible purchases?

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kazinator
How about safety? You can't be coerced by criminals to withdraw money from
some ATM in a deserted area at night, if the ATM is shut down.

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lindig
What are the economics of this? The student rate is about $10/month which
seems worth it given that your bike is safe and dry. But how long would it
take to recoup just the cost to build something like this? Just for
comparison, a conventional parking spot in a car parking garage (with no
robotic access) costs about $15.000 or $500/m^2 for the building.

~~~
aaron695
Pretty sure it's only possible because of the way the Japanese subsidise
things so much. I think building down is generally as expensive as building
up.

Could be $1.5 million per 200 bikes -

[http://www.therecord.com/news-story/3901727-a-gateway-to-
und...](http://www.therecord.com/news-story/3901727-a-gateway-to-underground-
bicycle-parking/)

~~~
lindig
That would mean about $7500 per bike or half as much as a conventional parking
garage costs per car. There is no way this can be operated profitably at
$10/month/bike or even $20/month/bike as it would take 30+ years to recoup the
costs before running costs.

~~~
oh_sigh
You're assuming that every customer has a unique slot assigned to them. I'm
sure that they have many more customers than actual bike slots, banking on the
fact that at any given moment maybe only 2% of their customer base is using a
given station. With that complete guess, the subscription fee would bring in
$100k/month, which puts it at a reasonable timeframe to recoup costs.

Also, I think that I would slightly modify the subscription fee to prevent
people from parking their bikes in there long term. Like, you get 3 hours of
parking for free with your subscription, and anything after that is $2/hour,
or something along those lines. And non-subscribers could park for 3 hours for
a one time fee of $5, plus $2/hour after that.

With that in place, I could definitely seeing something like this be
profitable if it is placed at a popular retail destination where it is
possible to bike to.

~~~
lindig
You are right that they will sell more tickets than slots. I'm not sure this
works well with a subscription though, as one would feel entitled to a spot.
People most likely to use and need a subscription are commuters and those
would use their spot most of the time. So I doubt that banking on only 2% of
subscribers using the service would work.

~~~
oh_sigh
Well, "city bike" rentals are very similar. You pay for a subscription, but
you may show up to a bike rack and find they are all taken. It would take good
tuning to make sure you don't over subscribe the service, and maybe some kind
of way of showing the customer what the current capacity of the station is on
the web.

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shawnps
Danny Choo did a post on this:
[http://www.dannychoo.com/en/post/26963/Japan+Underground+Bic...](http://www.dannychoo.com/en/post/26963/Japan+Underground+Bicycle+Parking+Systems.html)

Looks like you can find one of these in Shinagawa

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dogma1138
From what i can tell i think it's actually the only one, been to Japan several
times since these were initially posted online and I've never seen them, or
any other type of an automated bike storage service.

Heck from what i can tell all the pictures and video seem to cover exactly the
same bike storage, and for some odd reason it's always empty when they film
it. While it's a nice idea i think it's way too impractical.

This seems to be less dense than what turns out of most traditional bike
parking systems, it's also much more expensive to build and maintain, and i
don't even want to start thinking of how easy for it to just get stuck, miss
read the tag on your bike, or heck for that RFID tag to simply just die / fall
off during storage.

If you use something like a Santa Cruz racing frame with every part made out
of carbon to commute to work, yeah the extra security is probably worth the
costs when you deal with 10K$+ bikes, but as far as most commuting bikes I've
seen in Japan and Asia in general nope, they aren't worth it.

~~~
w00kie
I know a couple in Tokyo: one in Shinagawa (the Danny Choo one), one in
Roppongi. The one is this video is a different one.

This is a company that makes such systems: [http://cycle-
tree.jp/](http://cycle-tree.jp/) They have more examples of installations.

~~~
cskau
Where's the one in Roppongi?

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jacquesm
The Dutch low-tech but ugly equivalent:

[http://www.citi.io/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/483-3.jpg](http://www.citi.io/wp-
content/uploads/2015/04/483-3.jpg)

~~~
ygra
Japan has very little space to devote for such things. Such a solution won't
work or scale there.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
We don't either :P And we have twice the per capita rate of bicycles compared
to Japan. The current projects are virtually all underground, but there's no
real need to automate it necessarily. See the other posts in this comment
thread about stacking bikes easily, and taking your bike down some stairs or
up with a conveyer belt. It's quite space efficient, easy to build, very low
maintenance, open to many different types of bikes etc.

~~~
ygra
Ah, granted, that makes sense. The automated part is mostly fluff, I guess. I
do understand the appeal for automatic car parking, though, as the facility
can be more space-efficient then.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
> I do understand the appeal for automatic car parking, though, as the
> facility can be more space-efficient then.

Yeah for cars it may work, but I don't see it becoming big.

1) Capital expenditure to build a facility that can move cars which weigh 4000
pounds on average I don't think ever will be economical

2) We're a few years away from automatically parking cars, and a few decades
from most cars having this ability. Much sooner than the possibility of seeing
thousands of mechanised car parks around the world.

But yeah it does make more sense than bikes. The issue with bikes here for
example is throughput. If you look at the bike facility video you see there's
one entrance, and one person waiting for the single-bike bandwidth facility to
retrieve or store his bike. That's actually very poor considering places where
parking is an issue, you tend to have hundreds of people picking up or storing
their bikes during peak hours. Which means you end up needing multiple
horizontal and vertical lanes and/or multiple facilities. All of this is
pretty expensive, and the lanes used for robots might as well be used for
people doing it manually. For cars throughput is also a problem but not as
much, as here we have about 18 bikes and 8 cars for every 17 people, and the
bikes are used more frequently. (i.e. you might drive from and to work once,
but you'll bike from and to work, friends, grocery store, drinks in the
evening, school etc), which means throughput is probably a bit more difficult
for bikes, which is where machines do poorly considering adding bandwidth
increases cost and decreases space efficiencies, which is the only thing this
storage has got going for it. (besides security).

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joosters
I'd love to know the reliability rate of the system. If just one bike jams up
or falls over during the loading/unloading, everyone's bikes become completely
inaccessible.

Maybe it works flawlessly, but it looks so fragile to me.

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ekianjo
Note for those not living in Japan. It's not everywhere like that :)

~~~
shawnps
I'm in Tokyo and I've never seen one before :) but I might start looking just
to try it out.

~~~
ekianjo
In Osaka the standard is just to drop your bicycle on the side of the street,
to the point that people can't walk anymore on that side :P

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nandemo
People do that in Tokyo too, but in a lot of places that's illegal, and the
police/kuyakusho have been actually enforcing it more and more.

~~~
ekianjo
I think the main difference is that it's not so strongly enforced in Osaka.

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lordnacho
Am I missing something here? Don't you have to dig a massive hole for this to
work? Why not a tower that sticks up instead?

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lotu
You don't want a massive tower in the middle of the street. It interferes with
traffic.

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rasur
I'm sure the end of the video shows the doors closing on the front wheel of
the bike!

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fredsted
It's at the same position as when the video started.

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IkmoIkmo
Throughput is not really mentioned here, which is the key bottleneck I think.

Nobody really has huge issues parking their bike at home. Humans are
sufficiently spread out around a city, and so bike density is similar to human
density, which is not that bad.

The problem areas for storage solutions for bikes is at areas with very high
density. Here in the Netherlands that's the train stations. At the Central
Station of big cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam, hundreds of thousands of
people pass every day, relatively small areas. Many of those arrive or leave
by bike. Storing those bikes is tricky, not only because of space concerns,
but also because the vast majority of people (probably 80%) arrive/leave
during two periods of about 90 minutes of peek travel time in the morning and
evening.

In other words at any one point during those periods, you have hundreds of
people storing or retrieving their bicycle at the same time.

That is totally incompatible it seems with this device, which retrieves at
most 2 bikes or so per minute. A person has to walk up, enter his card, his
password, then the device has to do some stuff, then he has to retrieve it
from the device, walk away.

Compare storing your bicycle at a train station for example with buying train
tickets. At the Central Station you'll easily find dozens and dozens of
machines to buy a ticket, and lots of booths to do so as well, and still you
see rows of people at peek times. Even after we've had subscription based
tickets for decades (e.g. take any train and pay x per year) and card based
systems (if the balance on your card drops below $10 it can get automatically
refilled. Just swipe your card to enter the train) for years which means most
travellers don't even need to purchase a ticket.

So you'd need quite a lot of these machines and I don't really see how that'd
make economic sense. We've had a lot of good experiences with manual
underground, cheap, low-maintenance facilities now that are a better
alternative. And for low-throughput areas, storage of bicycles isn't a very
big issue, meaning the economics (premium price, no doubt) make even less
sense when there are plenty of free storage opportunities (on the street).

For certain bikes it makes sense (those costing $10k). But that's not the norm
in countries with high per-capita rates of bikes. I and everyone I know have
had bikes costing at most 200, I tend to buy them for 80 or so second hand
with 20 of annual maintenance. I can store it infront of my house just fine,
it's never a problem. The rate of theft means it's cheaper to buy a new one /
insure the bike for a fraction of its cost, than to pay $100+ a year for
storage like this (and even that rate is unlikely to be profitable for this
facility). And at the central station where it is hard to park a bike without
adequate facilities, retrieval would be too slow, and manual underground
facilities are fine.

