$20 Cardboard Bicycle Could 'Change The World,' Inventor Says
npr.org
npr.org
I happen to love the Lego-block nature of cargo containers, and while doing research on them first stumbled into this pattern: it seems that every third design major comes up with the idea to use cargo containers as cheap pre-fab houses. Well, it turns out that while cargo containers are relatively cheap, they're really not all that good for housing - they're too small, they're uninsulated, they need as much (or more) build out on the inside as a regular house, they're harder to put windows into, etc.
The same sort of pattern appears with all sorts of other materials: people get the idea that left over offcuts of wood at house construction sites can be laminated into tables or bathtubs, that asphalt shingles and be ground up and used as a flex fuel, that cardboard can be folded into bicycles, that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side, etc.
All of these schemes fail in similar ways:
* they ignore the huge amounts of evolved-in wisdom that long-held solutions have
* they ignore production costs
* they ignore labor costs (the "Earthship" underground house plans are great...but they implicitly assume that a thousand hours of labor swinging a sledgehammer is free)
* they ignore the costs of ancillary features (brakes on a bike, insulation on a house)
* they pretend that some materials are "green" and others are "anti-green".
* they often assume a superior attitude to people in the third world, assuming that first world design students have better ideas than millions of third world people who actually know what resources are available and what features are desirable.
Steel bicycles have a TON of evolved cleverness in them. They are the end result of a fierce evolutionary winnowing.
If you're ever tempted to announce to the world that everything that's gone before has been mistaken and you've got a solution for other people that's a ton better, take a moment and think through all the OTHER criteria that these people might consider relevant. You may have come up with a wonderful new idea (it happens!), but chances are that there are good reasons that the idea has not already been adopted.
1) Practicality vs "creativity"
When you see design projects, such as the cardboard bike, that are clever but completely impractical, design schools and design contests are largely to blame. This is the kind of design that will win you prestigious awards and good grades, but will never actually see production. There is a huge disconnect between the kind of design that most designers want to do, and what they actually make a living doing. As a result, they fetishize these impractical concept pieces.
2) Design education vs professional practice
Most design schools are still teaching (and grading students on) their hand-drafting skills. The number of professional firms that produce finished work entirely by hand is getting smaller and smaller every day, and yet many schools do not teach their students digital design, or do so on a very superficial level. Note: This applies to hand-finished final designs. I believe that hand-sketching is still invaluable in the early stages.
3) Cost of education vs reward
The job market for designers is abysmal. And if you do manage to get a job, you will be paid much less than the rest of your college-educated peers, despite working longer hours and (in the case of architecture) spending longer in school. Design school itself is outrageously expensive, even at state institutions, due to the cost of class materials and the fact that most programs do not leave you with enough free time to hold down a job.
In short, I'm studying computer science now, and couldn't be happier.
Make your app receive LEED accreditation!
Real third world bicycle is same as first world but with hand made steel frame, because frames are most overpriced components: http://i.imgur.com/qpw0a.jpg People use bicycles for decades and can afford to buy or exchange it by parts ever in third world countries. If such conventional bike cost 100 dollars and can last 20 years then cardboard bike must last at least 4 years to be competitive. And people with unstable income prefer long lasting solutions because there is probability that there will be no money in future to buy replacement.
Tubing is lighter, stiffer and cheaper. It can be used with conventional bike parts (bottom bracket, headset, seat tube etc).
A tubular steel bike gives you the option of using lugged construction, which in turn allows you to braze instead of high-temperature welding.
There really isn't much to like about the rebar bike at all.
Rebar of that diameter isn't even commonly available.
It's also unusable heavy, and a needless waste of valuable steel scrap.
Sell that several hundred hunk of rebar, and buy yourself a brand new bicycle.
Here is a guy that did one as a sculpture at his university: http://rebarbike.tumblr.com/
No. We're talking about poor people. A $20 bike that lasts less than 4 years is much more attractive for many people than a $100 bike that lasts 20 years because they don't have $100 to spend on a bike.
> And people with unstable income prefer long lasting solutions because there is probability that there will be no money in future to buy replacement.
Prefer? Sure, but I think you're overlooking the fact that poor people often can't afford that luxury (sometimes due to their own poor decision making resulting in a vicious cycle but that's still the reality).
[1] is a bike designed by people who know what they are doing for 3rd world conditions. It has evolved over years to something that will last 20 years easily in Africa and can be serviced by people on the ground there with no special infrastructure.
the result is a robust bicycle engineered specifically for rural African terrain and load requirements. Branded the World Bicycle Relief Buffalo Bicycle, it is designed, tested and assembled in Africa with close attention to end-user feedback and rigorous quality control.... Furthermore, World Bicycle Relief Buffalo Bicycles are compatible with locally available spare parts, ensuring that with proper maintenance they will last for years.
The frames are mass produced in Asia (I assume China) and I'd be surprised if they are more than $10 each (based on priced of frames available on AliBaba).
If you are interested in this then http://worldbicyclerelief.org/ does a pretty good job of not only distributing bikes but making sure they train mechanics and providing tools etc to avoid reliance on external parties.
Obviously there is still a ton of room for innovation on the industrial design front and it's great to see your focus on how much work actually goes into solutions that scale. That lightning bolt idea you get may be the start of something if you have the persistence to work out the details.
Incidentally this is one of the huge problems with work being done in the developing world - people think they've created a magic bullet idea but don't have the persistence to work out the details and eventually they give up, usually blaming some external factor.
I do disagree with this though:
that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side, etc.
Cheap and widely available computing devices can do a lot to raise literacy and technical skill across the world. BTW, the latest iteration from the OLPC project just uses solar charging.
I also think there is still room to apply 1st world design techniques to 3rd world problems.
I've been quite intrigued by some of the projects I've seen, such as the cylindrical water container that can easily be pulled with a rope, or some of the other water purification devices which can be made with local materials.
There are some other projects than can help turn a mobile phone into a medical diagnosis tool. I'd like to see more things like that.
There is a semi-controversial architect named Peter Eisenman who made a similar claim. His thought was that architecture should only be studied at the graduate level, leaving your undergraduate education for something more practical.
After getting a taste of undergraduate design education, I'm inclined to agree.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but what I'm criticizing is the idea that a bunch of pie-in-the-sky academics are going to come up with a better solution than tens of millions of people working in parallel.
The OLPC programs was INSANE. First, there's lots of power in the third world - a hand crank is a crazy idea and makes it look like a toy while adding mechanical complexity. Next, instead of using cheap commodity hardware it designed things from the ground up. Did you know that they were so adamant against using the round wheel that they decided to reinvent it? Ah, excuse me. Not wheel. Firmware. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d04
<shakes head>
Craziness all the way down.
Well, the hand-crank didn't work out, and they admitted that.
I disagree though that there is a lot of power in the third world. Looked at from an absolute cost as well as a relative-to-income cost, electricity is quite expensive for a large percentage of the world's population. Just look at Pakistan, for example. [1] Its much worse in other parts of the world. A lot of the slums surrounding major cities don't officially exist, so they don't officially get basic services (water, sewage, power) either.
So the OLPC project, rather than rely on cheap off-the-shelf hardware, tried to radically reduce power consumption for the people living effectively off the grid.
They were also concerned about the lack of wired/wireless communications infrastructure in these areas. So that drove the push for wireless peer-to-peer networking, and the need for the networking to run even while the rest of the board is powered down. And that drives a radically different board design, and thereby the BIOS too.
These days, it is feasible to accomplish many of their same goals with tablets, and that's what they've been working on. There was no significant low-power computer market back in 2007 to draw upon. Now there is.
If these third world countries all had decent mobile data infrastructure (at least 2G), and everybody could at least afford a phone or something to access the Internet, then the OLPC project wouldn't be needed. That definitely was not the case in 2007, and is still not the case in 2012 for many parts of the world.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Pakistan
I don't want ANYONE in charge of the "innovation budget". Innovation budgets gets us things like the Soviet Union, or SEMATECH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEMATECH or MITI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MITI
That's my whole point: good ideas bubble up from the bottom with tens of millions of people using local knowledge and refining and playing with existing ideas: not intellectuals working from the top-down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA
Or CERN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Computer_science
Or the South Korean tech and steel industries, or...
I agree with you that this assumption, especially with overzealous design students, can often be false. But (going a little off-topic) I sometimes see this extended here on HN towards the attitude that we don't have any responsibility towards the third world, and the best thing we could do to help them is to stay away. With that I disagree. First worlders have advanced maths and superior computing power which, in many cases, allows for strictly better design given the same materials. Take antennas for an example - there is a whole branch of science built around it that amounts to discovering even more imaginative ways of bending metal rods[0]. I do strongly agree with anonymfus below [1] that we shouldn't hook the third world up to our industry and sell them things they can't hope to produce or maintain, but we do have an enormous amount of knowledge about pretty much everything; knowledge they could use to vastly improve their lives. So I'm all for co-operation between people from both worlds.
[0] - by the way, I find this to be an amazing example of the power of human thought - we're basically bending pieces of scrap metal, turning stuff that was worthless few hundred years ago into something very useful, and quite often expensive.
But it is better than an iPhone app that lets destitute people find educational and training opportunities near their location.
Likewise, a cardboard bicycle. There are many circumstances where it is probably preferable to no bicycle, but probably few circumstances where it would be preferable to a typical bicycle constructed in a conventional manner.
Over the long term, the cardboard bicycle is likely to be an increasingly less preferable option as the availablity repairs and the availability of replacement parts becomes a greater concern than initial cost. There's a huge standardized infrastructure of dimensions and components which make the use of bicycles more practical.
Even the FP-45 Liberator was ultimately deemed impractical for any purpose other than psychological warfare.
Every week someone invents a new hubless bike, electronics that can bend 180 degrees in any direction or folding power plugs and switches that ignore the physical fact that behind the wall there is not and endless amount of space
What One Laptop per Child was trying to do was bring education and the internet to third world countries that don't have it. It wasn't a plan to get rich, it was people realizing that a lot of third world problems stem from poor education, and a technical person's solution.
I'm not sure why it failed exactly, but I know that Intel saw the laptop and made a "netbook" based on that concept that was naturally more expensive because it included all the things that OLpC was trying to avoid.
http://www.fitjog.com/bicycles-for-weight-loss/atlas-bicycle...
At roughly 60USD that is a bike sold on the best SEO'd web site. What is sold out of local garages will be less.
I am not a Indian native and I am not a developmental economist, but I cannot see a cardboard bicycle doing this http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingpongong/7855376404/ or this http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidg/533780375/
The traditional Phillips style bike has a long pedigree - its brakes may be useless and its long in the tooth but everybody in SE Asia can fix one.
When a cardboard bike folds, you throw it away and get a new one.
I think the environment will still have a net win on steel.
Many, if not most of the young people in India own a Bicycle not for recreation, but as a serious mode of transportation.
I will take a $60 steel Bicycle over a $20 cardboard bicycle anyday.
It doesn’t make any sense at all.
At the end of the day, everyone would be better off if no one built cheap bikes, and they only built high quality bikes that people would resell in a used market as they got older. Riding a cheap bike is at best uncomfortable and at worst dangerous.
[Added] Bicycle frames last for 20+ years, it doesn't seem like the environment is really a factor here whatsoever.
That's conservative - my mom has (steel) bike frames hanging in her garage that date back to the 1970's that are in great shape and they've barely been maintained in the interim. I'm guessing a well-maintained frame could last for 50 years.
This project (and other ones I've seen, like bamboo bikes) generally only create bike frames, the one part that won't really help the developing world.
To the cardboard bike's credit, the wheels are pretty cool. Find a way to make brake pads, chains, tubes, and tires from locally sourced or recycled materials, and you'll really be on to something!
Comfort on a bike, on well-maintained paved road, is mostly a matter of ergonomics - measurements, essentially.
Safety on a bike is mostly a matter of maintenance and fairly basic requirements of the materials and construction. Can it stop when you want it to? Will it stop suddenly when you don't want it to? Will the frame remain the same shape for the lifetime of the bike? Are the fasteners secure? This stuff isn't expensive and doesn't need to be.
I personally would never spend more than 200 USD equivalent on a new bike as a practical form of transport. Any more than that and thinking about security starts to dominate use, creating anxiety wherever you've chained it up, etc.
Oh, and cheapest brake pads? Here are some sold in the UK, free delivery, for 3.84 USD equivalent: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002VWP0FK
Too expensive? Here are some sold from Hong Kong, free delivery again, for 1.92 USD equivalent (half the price): http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270...
I'm fairly sure you could get these for a tenth the price buying them in bulk further upstream.
-While it's a good idea to use recycled parts, no manufacturer is going to go through the trouble of creating a (conceivably multi-million dollar) factory to make these bikes and only sell them for twenty dollars.
-Let's not forget that $20 is still a heck of a lot of money in third world countries. Half the world lives on less than $2.50 a day[1].
-Bikes aren't that expensive or hard to come by, even in impoverished nations.
I think a real difference could be made if this guy set up a non-profit, sold these cardboard bikes to people who really like live "green", and donated the profits to the red cross or some other charity.
1-http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...
The rest of the components cost about $90. It's competing with Chinese bikes.
The plan has not been thought through, but it's great news bait.
Regardless, I don't think the cardboard bike is going to change the world. People have been experimenting with cardboard bikes for years, and they've never caught on.
To recycle metals you might need to do a bit of pre-processing, grind up everything a bit, and throw it in a crucible to melt it down. 100% recyclable and the same as new when recast.
To recycle paper you have to make sure everything is sorted (no plastic, metal, etc in with your paper) and do a good amount of chemical processing and the end result isn't as easily like "new" paper.
I don't see how this gives cardboard the edge in recycled materials use for a bike.
Energy used for recycling aluminum: 700 kWh/short ton. (Various websites.) Savings of about 95%!
I knew aluminum recycling was crazy efficient compared to refining it in the first place, but I'm surprised it's the same or even cheaper per ton as paper.
"Large, modern cells operate with a specific energy consumption of 5.9 to 6.4 kWh/lb of aluminum. The energy required to produce aluminum from scrap metal is approximately 5% of that required for primary production"
- http://www.eia.gov/emeu/mecs/iab/aluminum/page2e.html
The differential there is fascinating I think.
Now, if we are to prefer cardboard bikes for their environmental friendliness, we would probably want to look at what else is used to make the material strong. If it only works in combination with a bunch of toxic glues and solvents, then one will need tons of marketing to create a hype with smoke and mirrors to cover up that part of the picture.
I am excited about this project though. Because, in the end, even if we don't get a $20 bike, we might get the knowledge of converting cardboard into a cheap and easy to shape material we can play with at home for our own projects.
It's because:
1) They're lazy and don't like pedalling up hills
2) They're worried they'll get killed by a car
3) They're worried they'll get a puncture and be late or have their pants ripped on the chainring.
4) They have stuff to carry around and don't want to mess with a trailer.
Maybe it's only a problem for me (and I do tend to sweat a lot) but biking a hundred blocks to work without being able to take a shower after is not a viable option.
The solution: Make cities more bike friendly.
Its going to come down to urban planning, incentives, and community programs. Cheaper more affordable bikes are certainly a component of increasing adoption, but if you really want to move the needle we need the developed and developing world to look a bit more like the Netherlands, and not Texas.
Give people a bike that rides well and they're likely to continue to ride it. Give people a bike that they don't like and they're not going to ride that bike, and will be less likely to ride any bike in future.
Still good luck to them. Some places have horrific road accident death rates so getting people out of cars, off mopeds, and onto bicycles could help.
The practical impact of a new invention is inversely proportional to the attention it receives from the popular press.
Weird bicycles, 3d printers, "breakthrough" cancer drugs, alternative energy sources, etc ad nauseum.
Perhaps this one can restore some sanity.
Clearly they were keeping the expensive bikes[1][2] away from the windows then?
[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/worlds-fastest-bike-m...
[2] http://www.competitivecyclist.com/frame/2013-wilier-zero-7-r...
Although I doubt the $20 estimate without a way to automate production. The video made it seem like a fairly labor intensive practice.
I visited a city last week (Matsumoto) that has this service, they lend cheap city bikes for free by the day. Not even an ID card needed, you just write your name and phone number and go. It's a fantastic service when visiting.
http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567200-...