Photograph courtesy Shweeb Monorail Technology
In the late 1800s, a short-lived experimental transportation system in southern New Jersey took contraptions that looked like upside-down bicycles and mounted them on 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers) of rail for a smoother, faster ride than one could expect on bicycles of the day. More recently, the idea of a pedal-powered monorail has been revived and updated at a Rotorua, New Zealand, amusement park by a company named Shweeb.
Google invested $1 million in September 2010 to support further development of the system for an urban environment. Similar to the bicycle railways of centuries past, the Shweeb system is meant to reduce rolling resistance, "by running hard wheels on hard rail," according to the Shweeb website. But the Shweeb concept goes way beyond that. The design also seeks to cut wind resistance by positioning pedaling passengers in bullet-shaped hanging "pods" with their feet forward, as on a recumbent bicycle. The pods hang from 8-inch-wide (20-centimeter-wide) rails constructed 19 feet (5.8 meters) above street-level pedestrians and traffic.
Worried about passing? No need, says the Shweeb team--tailgating can actually help both riders travel faster. That's because a solo pod would have a high-pressure zone, or headwind in front, and a low-pressure zone, or vacuum behind. But when one pod sidles up behind another, it eliminates the vacuum for the lead pod and the headwind for the trailing pod. In short, resistance is cut by half. The company's website promises, "Just as tandem bicycles always travel faster than two single bicycles, two Shweebs travelling in a train always travel faster than either of them could travelling solo." Don't just take it from Shweeb, though. Consider the NASCAR technique known as "two-car bump drafting," in which racers link front and rear bumpers to effectively drive as one car with two engines.
According to Peter Cossey, managing director of Shweeb Holdings, the company is hard at work on the Google-backed R&D project and hopes "to have something out" in late 2012, although with ambition to build an accessible, green, cost-competitive, and fun transit solution, he wrote in an email, there remains "a lot on the to-do list."
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