As a gentleman and a scholar, I am duty bound on occasion to expose some real racket, especially when it brings into disrepute the institution of academia, in which god himself should be able to trust. The Copenhagen Wheel is touted as a revolution for cities, and soon to be in production. It is the product of MIT's SENSEable City Lab, a group I can't quite figure out to be honest. If this is a bunch of students just having fun, then rock and roll baby. All credit to them. But they do come across as some kind of MIT sanctioned think tank, slash research centre, slash commercialiser of research.

The Copenhagen Wheel is an electronic assist hub, activated by torque sensors—nothing new there—on top of which SENSEable City Lab have thrown everything they could think of. It is controlled by riders’ iPhones. This does make me wonder why power tools, cellos, cars, fighter planes, or anything really can't be controlled by our phones? I guess though, not being able to see the screens in the sun, could be a problem. Let's face it my honeys, the idea is daft. 
 
Dubious idea number 2: weighty sensors in thousands of Copenhagen Wheels, all over Copenhagen (and everywhere else), will create real time maps of the bumpiest roads. More weighty sensors will create real time maps of air quality. So, for carting all of that, um, stuff, in your hub, and uploading it at your expense to the ether, you will help others avoid the bumps and smog that you just rode through. To be honest, I'm not sure why anybody would do that. Look at it in terms of the prisoners dilemma and you will see why it aint gunna work. No one is going is going to fit a 15kg hub to their bike, to benefit others, with little chance of being benefitted personally. Dubious idea number 3: regenerative braking on bicycles. Dubious idea number 4: e-assist hubs. I could go on.

The digital age makes it free to relay hollow prophecies of every kind, so blogs like Coolhunting, and Treehugger, will naturally pick up and publish anything with catchy graphics. When it is issued under the auspices of MIT, you would think those blogs would be on solid ground, but apparently not.

A few weeks ago, I asked SENSEable City Lab if I could meet them to learn more about what they were doing. I did have my doubts, but was open minded. Okay, so next I was put to the trouble of preparing a presentation, that my audience there largely ignored, preferring whatever was on their own laptops. I was left to nag them for a chance to speak to anyone at all regarding what I had gone there to do: learn about their work relating to bikes.

I was given permission to film a clip of the wheel, using my iPhone, that with legalistic overtones they have since told me to pull off of youtube. Which is fair enough I suppose. They can't have known that my opinion of this wheel was slipping from reserved, to qualified, to utterly hopeless.