Japanese parking problems

Press, 7 December 1978, Page 25

Japanese parking problems

With 47 million bicyles, Japan is starting to have parking troubles in urban areas. To help solve the problem, "bicycle houses” are to be built, which it is hoped will provide parking for th r maximum number of bikes in the least possible space, while keeping the machines readily accessible. Designed by Ishikawa-jima-Harima Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. of Tokyo, the parking buildings are to be of novel and varying designs, and funded by

The extent of our debt to the bicycle is not widely realised. It is to the bicycle that we owe the development of such basic technologies as lightweight tubular construction; ball bearings (1877); tangentially-spoked wheels (Starley, 1874); die bush-

$l5 million of Government money. One features a prefabricated tower in which rows of bikes are aligned on parking gondolas like the cars of a ferris-wheel. Modelled on existing car-parks, the weatherproof, six-storey building shelters more than 500 bicycles on just 74 square metres. Another plan is for a split-level modular construction, which provides parking and other racilities and where bikes are stored on vertical coinoperated racks.

and-roller chain, (which complemented the chain-and-sprocket drive adopted the previous year, Renold 1880)uvkzumatic tyres (1888); and the flexible control cable. The differential was invented by Starley to solve the inherent dangers of cornering on a tricycle.