One problem facing cyclists in Japan is where to park your bike, and to help address this problem, construction company Giken have come up with a solution which stores hundreds of bicycles underground using a system called Eco Cycle – a robot system which stores bicycles underground in a 11 metre deep well.
Firstly, a cyclist who wants to use the storage system has to become a member. For students it costs 1,300 yen (€9.50) to park for a month and 1,800 (€13.20) yen for others. Users can park and retrieve their bicycles an unlimited amount of times for this price.
All the cyclist has to do is touch his membership card on a reader and insert his bike into the cubicle. The storage system then transports the bike up to 11 metres underground, where it is held in one of the 204 bike racks.
A cross-section of the bike storage system is shown below:
There are warning signs asking owners to remove things like valuables and pets from the basket before stowing their bicycle away. There is a little chip inside an attachment which fits to your bike, which will open the door of the loading bays when you push the bicycle near it. This whole process takes about 8 seconds – same for retrieval too.
Check out the video below to see the underground bicycle parking system in action:
