NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Create Your Own Bike Lane, on the Go

A mounted laser that projects bike lane lines onto the street at night joins the ranks of lit-up safety gear for cyclists. The question is: Does it actually work?

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The XFire bike lane safety light was created by a Los Angeles based company with the goal of helping bike commuters stay safe. The patent-pending light costs about $40, contains five bright red LEDs, and projects two visible red laser lines on either side of the bike. It reminded me a little of the BLAZE device, which projects a bright green shared lane symbol on the road ahead of a cyclist.

British blogger Trevor Ward recently took the XFire tail-light for a spin and described his experiences in the Guardian online. Although a dog walker was impressed by the lasers, a neighbor who followed Ward in her car said she didn't really notice the lines and didn't feel the need to give him more room.

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You might be wondering why I try the XFire out myself. The truth is I've already got some bright (and expensive) flashing bike lights, and they've made me realize that lights can only do so much.

Many Colorado drivers don't care that my bike is lit front and back, or that I'm in a bike lane with reflective painted lines, or even that the crosswalk just automatically lit up to signal that they should stop for me. There have been a bunch close calls, and I was carefully following the rules.

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Better city planning could make more of a difference. Recently several main streets in my Denver neighborhood, which hasn't historically been the most bike-friendly area, were painted with shared lane symbols. Two bike shops have also opened up. Lasers are fun, but I'm looking forward to the day when drivers expect to see bikers everywhere.

Photo: Still from a video showing the XFire laser system in action. Credit: Alex Choi

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LED Handlebars Illuminate Bike Safety

When it comes to bike safety, there is no shortage of illuminating reflectors, clamp lights and frame lights to make night riding less of a dark peddle down the road of hazard.

Yet the newest addition to hop on that saddle entirely does away with the need for fastening anything to your bike. Instead, Mitchell Silva has created GLOBARS and they perform just like they sound. They're handlebars integrated with LED lights.

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"My idea was to create a bicycle light that could be easily used, and offer the same user friendliness of integrated bicycle lights, while remaining at a significantly lower price point," Silva wrote on his website.

For his prototype, Silva cut long strips out of the bars and installed plastic tubing on the inside to keep them rigid.

"I then installed approximately 40 high-efficiency LED bulbs into the inner plastic tubing, and installed a momentary actuator button on the back of the bars," Silva explained. "The whole system runs off a watch battery."

Silva envisions his GLOBARS benefiting those who face the most danger: urban cyclists. In 2009, 630 cyclists were killed in the United States alone and 51,000 were injured. Of those accidents, 70 percent occurred in urban areas.

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Besides their safety attributes, GLOBARS are super bright and, not to mention, really cool-looking. And who wouldn't want to ride around the city streets at night gripping a pair of glowing-bull-horn handlebars?

via Coroflot

Credit: Mitchell Silva

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Fashionable Bicycle Helmet Inflates for Safety

Hövding Bike Helmet: $450

As gas prices go up, bicycles are becoming as standard a feature on the road as a car. However some commuting cyclists don’t wear helmets, whether to avoid “helmet hair” or having to find somewhere to store it. For the fashion-forward cyclist who still cares about safety, there’s the Hövding bicycle helmet. The Hövding is a collar device that contains a hidden hood-shaped airbag that only inflates when its sensors notice erratic movements of the cyclist during an accident. The senors in the Hövding are extremely sensitive to the rider’s movements, and can sense when a movement is normal and when it is following the pattern of an accident.

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The collar device can be switched on or off and has different shells to change up the design whenever the rider wants. It does require a charge, which can be done through a USB port. This kind of thing may seem like a cop-out to appease people who don’t want to wear a helmet, and in a way it is, but it beats the alternative, which for lots of cyclists is nothing. One down-side to this “invisible” helmet is that, like an airbag, once it’s been deployed it can’t be used again.

Credit: Hövding

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Cyclists Stay Safe with LED Spoke Light

Spokelit LED bicycle wheel light: $7.99

Remember riding your bike as a kid, pretending to go at warp-speed down a hill? Now you can at least look like you are, and ride safer, with the Spokelit LED light from Nite Ize. Spokelit is a small battery-powered LED light that securely attaches to most three spoke cross pattern wheels and even stays in place during off-road riding. It has two illumination modes, steady glow and flash, making it hard to miss you during those nighttime rides.

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When riding at fast to medium speeds, the Spokelit creates the effect of a moving circle of neon light that, while keeping you safe, looks really cool. It comes in four different colors (including "Disc-O" that is micro chip controlled and cycles through the color spectrum) and is water and shock resistant.

Credit: Nite Ize

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Bike Laser Aims to Increase Cyclist Visibility

Hopping on a bicycle saddle and peddling through the heart of the city is not for the faint of heart. Besides being safeguarded by minimal protection amidst aggressive traffic, their slower pace and low visibility often subject bikers to unfathomable road rage and projectiles hurled from angry motorists.

I've been grazed by enough tossed cups, bottle caps, and side-view mirrors to know that biker visibility is paramount to a more peaceful and safe coexistence between cyclists and motorists.

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Helping bridge this gap is BLAZE, a device invented by Emily Brooke, a final-year Product Design student at the University of Brighton. Her device alerts drivers to the presence of a bikers by projecting a laser image onto the road in front of the bicycle.

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"Eighty percent of cycle accidents occur when bicycles travel straight ahead and a vehicle maneuvers into them," said Emily Brooke, in a university news release. "The most common contributory factor is 'failed to look properly' on the part of a vehicle driver. The evidence shows the bike simply is not seen on city streets."

To make bikers more visible, the handlebar-mounted device projects a bright green, diamond-shaped shared lane symbol on the pavement, several feet in front of the cyclist. The symbol, even visible in daylight, can be made to flash on and off.

The idea is that motorists will notice the green image on the road and take precaution, even if they don't see the cyclist in their blind spot.

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When designing BLAZE, Brooke consulted with road safety experts, Brighton & Hove City Council, the Brighton & Hove Bus Company and driving psychologists. Her resulting invention has won her a tuition-waved course at Babson College in Massachusetts, where she will continue to develop the product. She is also being considered for an Enterprise Award, for innovation.

"With BLAZE, you see the bike before the cyclist and I believe this could really make a difference in the key scenarios threatening cyclists' lives on the roads," she said.

[Via Gizmag]

Credit: Emily Brooke

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Extreme-Sport Filmmaking Gets More Epic

If a mountain biker executes a 360 tailwhip before landing a 30-foot drop-off into a desert canyon, but no one is around to witness it, did it even happen? Rather than ponder the metaphysics of their extreme sports, adrenaline junkies have been filming their stunts, leaving audiences jaw-dropped and totally stoked.

But for every shaky, hand-held fisheye-lense clip, there's a thousand more clips that are just as amateurish. If you prefer your extreme sports movies to have a little more cinematic depth to them, then the epically narrated and beautifully filmed Life Cycles mountain biking movie just might be what your gnarly little heart craves.

Derek Frankowski and co-director Ryan Gibb spent years filming meticulous and gorgeous scenes of mountain bikers carving-up trails back-dropped by breath-taking landscapes.

“We started talking about it in 2004 and spent a couple of years talking to get in line with what we wanted to do,” Derek Frankowski told Wired.com.

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A longtime still photographer for mountain-bike and snow-sports media, Frankowski transitioned to video with the clear intent of adding more nuance and depth to a genre that is often quite predictable.

“We threw out what we knew about bike films and built this movie from the ground up,” Frankowski told Wired.com. “Typically, shots in a bike movie are a rider-based or location-based segment. You go to Alaska with some riders, or you do a segment at a dirt jump track with a big name.

“We threw that out the window. Our approach was more cinematic.”

Credit: Youtube screengrab

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Bendable Bike Wraps Around Post

I'm a college student, and I use my bike to get around just about everywhere. Plenty of students do the same thing, and like many other students, I've also had a few bikes stolen.

The problem is that bikes are about six feet long, but a bike rack is just a few inches wide, and usually looks something like this.

That's what Kevin Scott was trying to fix when he designed a bendable bike that can wrap itself up around any post. He's a 21-year old graduate of The De Montfort University in England, and his bendable bike was runner-up in the Business Design Centre New Designer of the Year Award.

When he was a college student, Scott faced many of the same problems I have in keeping my bike secure. If you don't have a huge lock for the frame and the tires, a thief can easily walk away with half your bike. Because this bike can become so compact when you wrap it around a light post, one small lock can keep the frame and the tires safe.

According to Inhabitat's Brit Liggett, this bike uses a ratchet mechanism so it's both rigid and bendable, but not simultaneously. When you jump off the bike to park it, you push a lever on the frame and the bike becomes flexible, so you can wrap it around the nearest post or bike rack.

In a press release from the university, Scott says he plans to commercialize his design. “I am now going to take this forward to produce a fully resolved solution and hopefully this will be a stepping stone into a career in the bike designing industry,” he says.

Hopefully it's on the market before another one of my bikes is stolen.

Photo: Tony Kyriacou/Rex Features

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Bike Helmet Gets Stinky When Cracked

Bicycle helmets are available in many colors and sizes, but they are never designed to smell bad. Until now.

German researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials have developed a new process for bike helmets to smell ripe when they break.

The problem with conventional bike helmets (besides helmet head), is that you never know when it's time to replace them. A dinged up helmet can still be useful, but it's impossible to know for sure before you get in a serious bike accident. Helmets don't exactly have expiration dates.

But the smelly technology is supposed to remove that doubt. Inside the helmet are polymer materialscontained in tiny capsules. If the helmet cracks and the capsules break, a smelly oil begins to ooze out of the capsules. Large cracks really cause a big stink. The idea is that when you start to smell something particularly unpleasant -- and it's not just sweat -- it's time for a new helmet.

Dr.-Ing. Christof Koplin, one of the researchers working on this project, says plenty of bicyclists throw away perfectly good helmets just because they don't know if they're broken. In a press release from the Institute, he said:

"Cyclists often replace their helmets unnecessarily after dropping them on the ground, because they cannot tell whether they are damaged or not. The capsules eliminate this problem."

Researchers say this technology could go far beyond bike helmets. It could one day be used in any product where it is difficult to determine whether or not that item is still working properly, like plastic hoses for water and gas supply.

Maybe when researchers are done keeping our noggins safe, they can save our hair from helmet head too.

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