In Copenhagen a considerable fraction of the city's energy comes from renewable sources and many of their citizens ride bicycles. Apparently they want to know more about the ebb and flow of the bicyclists on the Copenhagen streets. But this strikes be as a pseudo-big-brother program in addition to be an interesting type of sustainable transportation.

It's an electric bicycle motor embedded in the hub of a wheel. The battery pack is embedded along with the motor. The motor is also said to include regenerative braking and it may be a pedelec system (meaning there's no throttle).

The monitoring system involves a wireless connection and they're offering a Facebook application allowing cyclists to find each other based on where they ride. The system is going to be sending to big brother information about where the rider goes, how fast they ride, and the total flow of other bicycles in the area.

This is a project of the SENSEable City Lab @ MIT whose idea is to spread ubiquitous sensors around cities so that city planners can have more data about the built environment and thereby do better planning. But of course big brother could also use this same data. But of course helping city planners know more can help them make better plans.

Big Brother? Well, the Green Car Congress posting makes it sound very nice and wonderful.. a hybrid electric bicycle, helps city planners know more, helps the cyclists know more, etc. As a bicyclist who rides an electric bicycle I do like knowing more about the performance of my bicycle. And I do have a fancy dashboard which tells me more about the performance of my bicycle. But do I want that information shared with the city? Uh... no.

As I see it there's a dark side to this. Ubiquitous knowledge of everybody's movements as they are moving around the city, doesn't that strike you as an eerie thing to implement? Perhaps they've promised some kind of anonymity in this project but a) can we trust them to tell the truth about anonymity of data and b) this is just a pilot project, so would anonymity be preserved when it's a commercial project?

To be real there are commercial possibilities for this. Suppose a bicycle dashboard were available which downloaded news and entertainment off the Internet, was available at ubiquitous kiosks around the city, offered free or low cost bicycle use, and was paid for by advertising blared over the dashboard. If they did a great job implementing entertainment featuritis then the users might even welcome the presence of advertising if the bicycling is free. And there are commercial bicycle transit operators in some cities such as the Cyclocity service in Brussels, Lyons and other cities. A bicycle service operator would obviously want to track the location of their bicycles, e.g. so they could retrieve the bicycle if it disappears. To aid in deterring theft they might include a camera which snaps the users picture transmitting it back to headquarters. What are the big brother implications of that.

In any case this is an interesting project by MIT and Copenhagen. Despite my detour into big brother theories I do wish them well.