On Apr 23, 12:23 pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
This has been semi-seriously proposed in relation to cycle lanes - since
the main limit on bike speed is air drag, if you move the air at 10 mph in
the direction of travel (involving putting the cycle lane in a tube), you
give everyone a 10 mph speed boost.

Bear in mind though , if you cycle at the same speed as the moving air
you'll have no wind to cool you. And if you're in an enclosed tunnel
you'd probably get pretty hot & sweaty pretty quickly! Besides which ,
having a forced air tunnel rather defeats the purpose of zero
emissions cycling since something will have to power the fan.

B2003

On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Boltar wrote:

On Apr 23, 12:23 pm, Tom Anderson wrote:

This has been semi-seriously proposed in relation to cycle lanes -
since the main limit on bike speed is air drag, if you move the air at
10 mph in the direction of travel (involving putting the cycle lane in
a tube), you give everyone a 10 mph speed boost.

Bear in mind though , if you cycle at the same speed as the moving air
you'll have no wind to cool you.

The idea is that you go faster than the air - you pedal at 10 mph, but
because there's 10 mph of wind, you do 20 mph.

And if you're in an enclosed tunnel you'd probably get pretty hot &
sweaty pretty quickly!

Yes, this idea does rather depend on fresh air being blown into the
tunnel every so often, rather than having one stream from end to end!

Besides which , having a forced air tunnel rather defeats the purpose of
zero emissions cycling since something will have to power the fan.

Yes. It might still be more energy-efficient than a car, but it starts to
sound unlikely to beat mass transit.

Still fun, though!

tom

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