Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

Transportation poses an ongoing dilemma: it is necessary for economic development, and yet, is associated with immense environmental degradation. To mitigate this issue, we urgently need innovative solutions that are not limited to providing greener vehicles, but instead, combine technical, systemic and behavioral approaches that can be adapted to many situations.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

The SENSEable City Lab at MIT is inspired by two things: predicting what may be the greatest needs and opportunities our cities face as they evolve alongside technology and then implementing solutions that support these anticipatory visions.
With this in mind, The Copenhagen Wheel project began by imagining (for the City of Copenhagen) what the future cycling city – or biking 2.0 – might look like. We envisioned how small amounts of technology could improve the cycling experience, ultimately getting more people on bikes, and how the four main obstacles to creating a great cycling city - distance, topography, infrastructure and safety – could be overcome.

What has resulted is the Copenhagen Wheel, an innovative device that transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. Controlled through your smart-phone, the wheel allows riders to capture the energy dissipated while braking and cycling and save it for when they need a bit of a boost. At the same time, sensors in the hub are mapping pollution levels, traffic congestion, friend proximity and road conditions in real time. This information supports a broader range of mobile applications and a social network, where alone or in groups, cyclists can plan greener routes, achieve exercise goals or meet up with friends on the go. Similarly, when this information is anonymously donated to cities, a fine-grained database of environmental information is formed that can support sustainable transportation infrastructure creation and environmental policy decisions.

Initial prototypes were unveiled at the United Nations Climate Conference in 2009. Since this time we have received global interest from individuals and cities in both developed and developing nations. Our next set of prototypes is due out in November 2010, with a proposed commercial launch in 2011. Each wheel has an estimated cost of $600 US.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

Our team believes that innovation in any market is more than a cost-competitive improved technical solution. Instead, successful solutions are those that can also be integrated into our culture in a sustainable manner. The Copenhagen Wheel aims to fulfill this belief. Firstly, it is a leap-frog technical solution for electric bikes: unlike other e-bikes, that are clunky, have external wiring, no regenerative braking and require the purchase of an entire bike, the Copenhagen Wheel is an easy to use, ‘sexy’, cost-competitive, self-contained unit that can be plugged into any bike. It has the power to traverse steep hills, can collect energy from braking and has batteries that last the average commuter a week between charges.

Secondly, with the benefit of some cheap electronics and a few small sensors, it is more than a vehicle to get you from a to b. It is also a new type of smart-device that when networked has the power to create a much bigger impact on environmental policies, future infrastructure creation and most importantly, transportation habits. This is achieved through our associated mobile applications that are powered by the data collected by each wheel. The combination of the applications and the technical encourage the continued use and acceptance of this sustainable transportation mode.

Lastly, when cyclists choose to donate their data to their city, this crowd-sourced information can be used to reduce the cost of surveys, identify potential transportation and environmental issues and better allocate resources.