RFID

I was writing back and forth with my brother and he has explained to me the infeasibility of GPS units in the bicycles. This is because of several good reasons:

1. cost prohibitive; the cost of outfitting a bike with GPS cound cost more than the bike itself.
2. not maintenance free; how would you service it if it was embedded in the frame for theft reasons?
3. power; establishing a way to provide enough power to send/receive data requires more than a hub generator... lights only take a few watts but GPS is a different story.

So we started chatting about RFID as he began to convince me of the negatives associated with GPS technology and after ward I did some research about different frequencies of Radio Frequency IDentification.


This company I found, SMARTRAC, makes different RFID products for handling information as simple as a serial number to as complicated as bank account information. Lamenting the impracticality of GPS (which would be a really cool, though cliche) I had an idea:

At races of all kind RFID is used determine the exact start and stop times of individual racerswith sensors over or next to the roadway.... Why don't we do the same thing here. like cellphone relay boxes, a powered RFID reader could ascertain in real-time the number and information of bikes passing that point. This isn't nearly as cost prohibitive of a system as GPS in thousands and thousands of bikes that will all conceivably somewhat different (especially if we dredge bikes out of the harbor). They could be attached like parasites on the sides of lamposts, that would feed a multitude of information (speed, direction, time, density relative rideable lane width, etc...) to a central database, as well as function with our zip-car styled share network online.

It could be like the bike counter that was mentioned here a while back


Also, I hate to plagarize, but the latest post about a bike parking area in DC uses a really clever rack system whose function is very clever... this pic pretty much says it all:


Anywho, thats what I've been doing recently, sorry about not making it last night... see y'all sunday.