Part of the many inconveniences of riding a bike include the issue of parking the darn thing.Here in
Montreal there's a - I'd say - a 35% chance that somebody will knock it down onto the sidewalk, a 17% chance that the bike will get stolen and a 94% chance that you'll return to your bike wondering why you decided to take your bike instead of your car.So my Japanese friends came up with an elegant solution: for $22 a month you get a pass that will allow you to park your bike in a creepy, weird and wonderful underground crypt.
You shove in your card, jam in the bicycle and walk off.
When you return you insert your card, wait 12 seconds and then ride off. The machine is a big tube that takes the bike to some underground location, the less you know about the better because there's all sorts of weird stuff going on down there.
One machine can handle about 100 bikes or something and that's the equivalent of a very large and ugly footprint of bicycles above ground.
These would also be useful for bixis, which aren't all that good right now because there are never any stands near places that I could use them.
I predict that we shall see these suckers within the next few years.