Japan Bicycle Parking Technology [video]
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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.
More likely is that it's to save money - if there is a cost incurred in supplying money for other banks or keeping the machine filled with cash, perhaps reducing hours is simply a cost saving measure.
I renewed a mortgage recently. I was told: you don't have to come in to sign anything. Just print the PDF's that we will send you, scan them, sign and e-mail them back.
That is basically faxing --- only significantly less convenient.
It's odd - we don't even need robots for these jobs, they are simply pointless. Perhaps they are made possible by large-scale underemployment due to automation in other areas.
"Not surprisingly, many corporate executives oppose extending employment protections to 65. Komatsu, the world’s second-biggest construction equipment maker, rehires 90 percent of its retirees with a 40 percent pay cut. 'I’m happy to keep workers on after 65, but I don’t think many are physically capable,' says Chief Executive Officer Kunio Noji, who is 65. Yasuchika Hasegawa, the CEO of Asia’s preeminent drugmaker, Takeda Pharmaceutical, and chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, says employers shouldn’t be forced by law to retain older workers. He is 66."
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-08-30/in-japan-ret...
That's no longer the case: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-04-06/humans-rep...
Could be $1.5 million per 200 bikes -
http://www.therecord.com/news-story/3901727-a-gateway-to-und...
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 $2/hour after that.
With that in place, I could definitely seeing something like this be profitable if it is placed at a popular retail destination where it is possible to bike to.
It's seriously cool though. Someone must have had fun designing it!
Looks like you can find one of these in Shinagawa
Heck from what i can tell all the pictures and video seem to cover exactly the same bike storage, and for some odd reason it's always empty when they film it. While it's a nice idea i think it's way too impractical.
This seems to be less dense than what turns out of most traditional bike parking systems, it's also much more expensive to build and maintain, and i don't even want to start thinking of how easy for it to just get stuck, miss read the tag on your bike, or heck for that RFID tag to simply just die / fall off during storage.
If you use something like a Santa Cruz racing frame with every part made out of carbon to commute to work, yeah the extra security is probably worth the costs when you deal with 10K$+ bikes, but as far as most commuting bikes I've seen in Japan and Asia in general nope, they aren't worth it.
This is a company that makes such systems: http://cycle-tree.jp/ They have more examples of installations.
http://www.haldo.com/images/CYCLE%20SHELTERS/optima-1-640.jp... (source: http://www.haldo.com/optima.php )
Edit: Lol, HN replaces ".jpg" with ".jp...". So much for shortening the link.
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).
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.70675,139.663513,3a,75y,197....
Maybe it works flawlessly, but it looks so fragile to me.
When you're going to do major construction anyway, you may as well build a human-accessible bike-parking structure or underground bike-parking area, which can probably be equally dense, and are almost certainly less of a maintenance burden.
The main advantage of robo-parking seems to be that it lets them use a very vertical space, which wouldn't work so well with "manual" bike parking.
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.