Highway, Bikeway
Urbanisation is not a strange term. For over the last decades people have been immigrating from the countryside to the city. And more people in town , means that there is a lot more space needed for living. And that is why cities are growing in surface. But cities are also changing in other aspects.
Cities and mega cities
Growing cities means that some of the cities will get near of each other more and more. One can also see this here in the Netherlands. Here, whole areas are evolving into urbanic ones. A concequence of this is that is made possible to travel the city near by bike. But the bicycle lanes we have nowadays are not fully evolved alongside the urbanic trend.
A biker highway
They have thought this out in Korea though. A bike highway has been built by this Asian Country between the cities of Daejeon and Sejong. It’s a 20 mile highway, exclusively built for bikes in the center of the normal car highway. On these biker paths, the healthy fanatics are able to travel to the nearest city without any obstacles.
A solar roof
But experimenting with infrastructure and city life automatically means sustainability these days. In this case they have also thought this out. Above this bike lane solar panels have been placed to catch the sunlight, but for what use is not known, which is slightly weird I think. Although it’s actually not. And that’s because I’ve written that it is not sure this bike lane had been produced to build to solar roof on it, or for bikers to take a ride on it.
E-bike on the E-highway
And to make it all more ‘green’, this highway could possibly be driven by the Farafay E-bike. This is an electronic bike which is possible to easily hit high speeds. Besides that, it provides its driver from electric assistance for over 20 miles. Just perfect for the Korean bike freeway, isn’t it!
The easy way
So, in this urban society, I actually think this is a cool idea. Because of cities growing to each other’s edges, it’s the next step to make those bike highways to provide bikers from an easy way to the near urbanic environment. And the apply of the sustainable aspect makes it an innovation of this time. I read that in The Netherlands they have also built a small version of the Korean one.
It’s not weird to think that these kind of combinations of mobility and sustainability will be a common aspect in our future cities. Solar panels are not something new at all, but these kind of combinations – a bikeway with solar roof – are.
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