Feds Spend $300K On Study On How To Ride Bikes
jd50ae
Everyone, Registered Users Posts: 4,109
By Elizabeth Harrington, FOX NEWS
The National Science Foundation has paid $300,000 for a study on how “humans interact with bicycles,” which a House committee is calling “wasted” taxpayer money, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The premise for the project , conducted from October 2009 to June 2013, was that bicycle dynamics are “poorly understood,” and researchers set out to come up with new designs to encourage more Americans to bike to lower their carbon footprint.
“Although human-operator control models exist for numerous aircraft and other vehicles, the bicycle with a rider is a human-vehicle system whose dynamic behavior is poorly understood,” researchers at the University of California, Davis, which received the NSF grant money for the project, said in a paper publishing their interim results.
The National Science Foundation has paid $300,000 for a study on how “humans interact with bicycles,” which a House committee is calling “wasted” taxpayer money, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
The premise for the project , conducted from October 2009 to June 2013, was that bicycle dynamics are “poorly understood,” and researchers set out to come up with new designs to encourage more Americans to bike to lower their carbon footprint.
“Although human-operator control models exist for numerous aircraft and other vehicles, the bicycle with a rider is a human-vehicle system whose dynamic behavior is poorly understood,” researchers at the University of California, Davis, which received the NSF grant money for the project, said in a paper publishing their interim results.
Comments
"The research objective of this award is to develop experimentally validated dynamic models of bicycles controlled by human riders. These models will be similar to those developed in the aerospace industry to understand pilot/vehicle interactions for the purpose of designing aircraft with desired handling qualities. The bicycle and human rider is distinct from aircraft and automobiles because most of the mass is in the rider, rather than the vehicle. This distinction presents unique challenges to developing guidelines for the design of bicycles with desired handling qualities and addressing this issue will be at the core of the research. Instrumented bicycles will be designed, built, and tested to validate the analytic models developed. Deliverables include validated dynamic models of the bicycle system under human rider control, software tools that can be used to further study bicycle dynamics and control, documentation of research results, and engineering student education.
If successful, the results of this research will improve the fundamental understanding of how humans interact with bicycles and will help to pave the way to the design of bicycles for a wider population audience and for a wider range of tasks. Systematic design of bicycles with more utilitarian purposes (as opposed to recreation) may be made possible, which in turn will lead to lower cost, healthier, and more sustainable modes of personal transportation. Graduate students will be directly involved in the research as well as in the dissemination of the results through classroom instruction, scientific publication, and outreach activities at the K-12 level and local science centers. The familiarity of children with the bicycle makes it an ideal candidate to spark their interest in future engineering careers."
So it's an analysis of bicycle/human interaction in order to better design a bicycle, whose design has remained essentially unchanged since its inception. If it makes the design of the bicycle more operator friendly and in turn gets more people to use a bicycle as opposed to a vehicle that runs on fossil fuels, it decreases pollution, decreases the impact on our already shoddy road and highway systems, and increases the health of Americans who choose to ride bicycles. If enough people choose to ride bikes, you wind up with a somewhat healthier population, which would ideally help lower the cost of healthcare.
In a 2008 study done by Rutgers University entitled "Walking, Cycling, and Obesity Rates in Europe, North America, and Australia" a clear correlation was observed between higher rates of cycling and walking and lower rates of obesity as is evidenced in the following graph.
Anything that can work towards improving the health of Americans while simultaneously helping reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and our levels of environmental pollution doesn't sound like a waste of money to me.
OUTSTANDING.....just harness whoopi goldberg's output.
As an aside I would be more then happy to drive an electric car if:
1. They went farther.
2. They went faster.
3. They were cheaper.
4. The drivers in TN knew what a turn signal was.
5. The drivers in TN knew what a stop sign was.
If that was real, California would lead the way to pass a law and find a way to outfit us with rectal meters.
Then tell me about that pie in the sky.
As loony liberal as I am, I just don't see the point of the federal government funding things like this when this a clear case where the private industry--i.e,, bike manufacturers could have funded it themselves. I mean, it's not as full-blown a waste of money as giving billions of dollars to defense contractors to develop unneeded weapons that don't work that even the military itself doesn't want simply to keep congressmen's local lobbyists happy. But as someone who has witnessed firsthand how big federal research grants are used mainly to generate never-to-be-read research that funds professor's salaries and provides work for Ph.D. students, I do look at most of these social research things with a jaded eye.
Of course, real bike lanes would mean spending the taxpayers money on the people, instead of on the special interests, so, that's a no-go.
JD makes a good point about TN drivers, though. I imagine that anytime the average Tennessean accidentally turns on their turn signal the question arises:
"What's that clickin' noise?"
.
Aj
Even with bike lanes, they still insist on riding down the middle of the highways, ride right through stop signs, lights and pay little attention to any traffic laws.
Imagine what everybody thought about the people "Investigating" bread and fruit mold........... years later... we have penicillian. Learning is never perfect or cheap.
Aj