Links and tidbits for Mon Aug 20, 2012
August 20, 2012
Links and tidbits for Mon Aug 20, 2012
August 20, 2012
The Invisible Bicycle Helmet | Fredrik Gertten from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.
Here’s our semi-regular roundup of interesting tidbits and links about transportation from the last week or so. If you have links to contribute, put them in the comments or email us!
- The video above has been making the rounds lately: it’s about an invisible bicycle helmet! Watch the video to see more, and here’s the company link.
- Amtrak moves to e-tickets on all buses and trains!
- Canada Line has some new art from Langara College.
- A suggestion from Ars Technica: pay people to get up and go earlier to fix traffic problems. (I believe Sheba mentioned this link — correct me if I’m wrong.)
- The Atlantic talks about bus riders and invasive advertising
- Edible bus stops in London!
- RATP, the Paris public transport company, created a website with a series of images of poor etiquette on transit, similar to our Pet Peeve series. They cleverly opened it up to the public to create memes with captions! The site is called Cher Voisin 2 Transport (“Dear Transport Neighbour”).
- More classic weekly BC Electric passes over at TransLinked.
- A researcher rides Greyhound buses for her thesis on social disengagement!
- Check out an interview with the City of Toronto’s new chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat: she has big ambitions to make the city better for transportation, especially pedestrians.
- And a provocative idea: a Toronto sales tax for for transit?
Regarding the invisble bike helmet, I thought that they were just being rebels, and that they just wanted to ride with complete disregard for safety. I’m glad to see that I was compleletly wrong. I applaud them.
I could see the helmets being used in so many sports.
Now that we know about it, the biggest fascination is that this wasn’t invented sooner.
I don’t know why they say helmets are uncomfortable – the closest I’ve ever gotten to that has been if it’s really hot out (and I have a black helmet). I wouldn’t mind one of those invisible helmets deploying and covering my back in an accident. Are they repack/reusable?
I’ve been looking at those old weekly passes and wondering why we don’t have them nowadays. Once Compass card takes over it would be good to have the option of a weekly pass instead of only monthly passes or single trips.
Invisible Bike Helmet: $600 per capita. High Quality Dutch style bike infrastructure: $30 per capita. I’ll take a pass on the “helmets” and advocate for cheaper (and safer) bike lanes.
@ Eugene: If those helmets are used in hockey, they would inflate every time they’re body checked (or squeezed into the boards) which would be a waste of $600 (because they’re not reusable).
Those helmets are pretty impressive. I imagine the hard part would be getting them to go around the head like that, and not just into a giant air-bag like ball at the back. They are expensive though, I suppose things like that would be.
@ Eugene
I agree. It would be interesting to see if something like that could be used in certain kinds of sports, perhaps even a user controlled one. Any kind of extreme sport would be able to benefit from something like this, in some way.
@ Kyle
They wouldn’t be very good in contact sports, for those obvious reasons. But something like say, motor cross it would give the driver a bit more visibility. Granted, I’ve never worn a motor cross helmet or those, but they look like they would provide a more natural neck movement. Certain sports could use something similar if they were user controlled, depending on how finicky they are. If a person knows they are about to bail from a high fall or jump of some sort, they would be able to deploy rather than wait for impact.
@ User
Maybe they could be built as full suits. If you have to jump out of a tower that is about to collapse, or if it has a fire, then you could put it on, and then inflate it as you jump. By time you hit the ground, it’d be fully inflated.
If it would actually work, then base jumpers might like that.
Another idea is to make it like a 2 layer bag. You climb in, zip it up, jump, and then it inflates on the way down. It would look like those hamster balls, so that no matter what way you land, you have some level of protection.
@Eugene
not sure how it would work in sports, since there is directly contact to the body in most sports
the airbag helmet seems to take advantage of contact to the bike
perhaps in equestrian or a motor vehicle sport
i question the effectiveness if you get t-boned or get knocked off by a swinging object because they only demonstrated head-on and rear-end collisions
@ Andrew
You are right about contact sports. There are probably very few sports that could use this. Maybe luge and other sled sports? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of much else.
Yeah, I wouldn’t trust this with other kinds of damage. Their YouTube channel shows a dummy doing a face plant.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Hovdingsverige
Maybe they need to cover part of the face to keep it from scraping the ground.