Yet Another Video of Amazing Japanese Bike Storage System
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 11. 6.09
A while back we showed a Japanese video of How They Store Bikes In Tokyo in crazy multistorey computerized bike parking garage. Now the Guardian picks up the story and shows us a video in English that you can see here.
The Guardian describes how it works:
Bikes are fitted with a small electronic tag. When the bike is placed into the ruts of the bike tree machine, a sensor logs the owner's details. A mechanical arm then emerges, pulls the bike into a cylindrical well and stores it at high speed in a free location. To retrieve the bike, the owner swipes a card through a reader and the bike is plucked from racks and brought back down - or up if it's a basement design - to earth. The process of retrieval normally takes 15 seconds but can be slightly longer (it took 30 seconds in my experience).
It is built by JFE Engineering company, and there are a lot of them, a modular scalable bike storage system. Their largest installation has an entire underground plaza.
Smaller systems have above-grade entries. Really, some countries know how to treat a cyclist.
Original Japanese video
More in the Guardian
Our earlier post:
How They Store Bikes In Tokyo
TreeHugger Picks: Bicycle Storage Options
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