Bike High-Wire Bypasses Traffic Problems

Posted on January 25, 2010 in Consumer Goods, Uncategorized

If you encounter heavy traffic on your daily bicycle route, scientists have a solution to keep you safely guiding. The Kolelinia is a high-wire for bikes that lets riders fly above the streets and beat the rush hour crowd. Bulgarian architect Martin Angelov is the brains behind the high-tech bike path.

Suspended high above the street, the Kolelinia consists of a gutter in which you ride and a guide cable that runs alongside the rider at handlebar height. Bikes are connected to the safety line with a tethering device. With these safety measures in place, the bikes pass over the cable. Should you fall off, a safety cable prevents you from hitting the pavement.

The device is intended to be used only at high-traffic junctions, rather than being a freeway in the sky. But critics point to the difficulty of making turns on the track and the fixed handlebars as dangers of the system. For the time being, it looks like bicyclists are safer by brushing up on road safety—the kind that takes place on the ground, rather than above it.