Cool eh? I think the Japanese have a culture for this stuff. It reminds me off about 30 years ago I visited a Toyota engine making plant in Nagoya and it was unremarkable apart from there being almost no people on the line. Just engine parts trundling from one machine to another on automated conveyers. I don't think there was much computer control - it was pretty much mechanical mechanisms.
Japan is very much a land of contrasts. You have things like this and their precision manufacturing. And then you enter an office and you're caught in a whirlwind of paper and faxes. And don't get me started on their banking. ATMS with opening hours...
Or the guys with umbrellas making sure you don't get splashed by the guy washing the window once story up. Or the guy with a glow-stick warding you away from walking into an already signed road/pavement repair.
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 exactly what you're talking about but still relevant:
"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."
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.
I prefer this method any day. Most people in the younger generations don't have a house phone line, much less a fax machine. It's so annoying to me when I have to send something to a company and the only method they accept is a fax. Luckily that has changed quite a bit in the past few years.
Do you know the reason for that? It takes more effort to program a machine to turn off during certain hours than it does to just let it run 24/7, so someone must have thought there was a compelling reason to disallow it. Maybe to prevent drunk people from overdrawing their account on horrible purchases?
Maybe to stop a rush on cash deposits in the case of a banking scare out of hours? ie. rumour / announcement that the bank has run out of money. Seems unlikely.
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 imagine a manual step somewhere along the way - not at the level of individual withdrawals and deposits, of course, so it scales well enough - but still someone has to be in the office until that ATM is closed.
What are the economics of this? The student rate is about $10/month which seems worth it given that your bike is safe and dry. But how long would it take to recoup just the cost to build something like this? Just for comparison, a conventional parking spot in a car parking garage (with no robotic access) costs about $15.000 or $500/m^2 for the building.
Pretty sure it's only possible because of the way the Japanese subsidise things so much. I think building down is generally as expensive as building up.
That would mean about $7500 per bike or half as much as a conventional parking garage costs per car. There is no way this can be operated profitably at $10/month/bike or even $20/month/bike as it would take 30+ years to recoup the costs before running costs.
You're assuming that every customer has a unique slot assigned to them. I'm sure that they have many more customers than actual bike slots, banking on the fact that at any given moment maybe only 2% of their customer base is using a given station. With that complete guess, the subscription fee would bring in $100k/month, which puts it at a reasonable timeframe to recoup costs.
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.
You are right that they will sell more tickets than slots. I'm not sure this works well with a subscription though, as one would feel entitled to a spot. People most likely to use and need a subscription are commuters and those would use their spot most of the time. So I doubt that banking on only 2% of subscribers using the service would work.
Well, "city bike" rentals are very similar. You pay for a subscription, but you may show up to a bike rack and find they are all taken. It would take good tuning to make sure you don't over subscribe the service, and maybe some kind of way of showing the customer what the current capacity of the station is on the web.
Yeah that thing looks insanely expensive. Also what happens when it inevitably goes wrong (e.g. someone leaves pannier bag on their bike and it gets snagged)?
It's seriously cool though. Someone must have had fun designing it!
It could also be owned or subsidized by the train company if it gets more people to commute and buy expensive train passes (land around train stations is extremely valuable for retail already)
From what i can tell i think it's actually the only one, been to Japan several times since these were initially posted online and I've never seen them, or any other type of an automated bike storage service.
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.
We don't either :P And we have twice the per capita rate of bicycles compared to Japan. The current projects are virtually all underground, but there's no real need to automate it necessarily. See the other posts in this comment thread about stacking bikes easily, and taking your bike down some stairs or up with a conveyer belt. It's quite space efficient, easy to build, very low maintenance, open to many different types of bikes etc.
Ah, granted, that makes sense. The automated part is mostly fluff, I guess. I do understand the appeal for automatic car parking, though, as the facility can be more space-efficient then.
> I do understand the appeal for automatic car parking, though, as the facility can be more space-efficient then.
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).
I'd love to know the reliability rate of the system. If just one bike jams up or falls over during the loading/unloading, everyone's bikes become completely inaccessible.
Maybe it works flawlessly, but it looks so fragile to me.
I think in most areas of Tokyo these things really aren't necessary, despite the high popularity of bicycle transport, because bicycle parking is fairly simple to cram in various nooks and crannies (lots of bike parking underneath train viaducts), and bikes are more popular in more less dense (suburban, outlying) areas than in the densest parts of the city core, which means there's usually a bit more space available too.
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.
Throughput is not really mentioned here, which is the key bottleneck I think.
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.
