Welcome to the new academic year

Welcome new students and staff and welcome back old users. We've gotten a lot of interest in participating in our system in the last couple of days with all the new students seeing our system. Our new software and electronics is still coming. We're going through some lab testing now to get it in good shape for public consumption. Unfortunately our big-time friends who are currently premier bikeshare company are having new software rollout delays too so we're not alone (http://bit.ly/NsMQUN). In the meantime, we'll get more aggressive about adding users into our system, though there will be a little bit of learning and relearning once we get our new software out. Also, since we're starting with a bunch of new users with our old software, everyone please pay careful attention to instructions. Our old (current) software can't handle user error. Our new (future) software will be a little more robust. Also make sure you watch the quick how-to video before you get to the station. 

Summertime for cycleUshare

It's been a while since the last post. The badly outdated "solar station not yet running" post was a little misleading. We're running, still dealing with a power-hog computer running down our solar capacity. We've developed an intermediate fix in the meantime. Now that we have some breathing room this summer, we're working on longer term fixes for the system.

This summer we have some big plans. First and foremost, we're pushing through with a true version 2.0 on the software (changing from Labview to C++), which is also going to include a big hardware redesign. Our prototypes work well enough to help us understand things we want to change and now we're pushing to get something that is a little more efficient and user friendly and hopefully more robust. We're redesigning all of our electronics to go along with it too, so that we'll have a scalable, reproducible solution. This should mean big changes for our system and our capability to expand beyond UT. We've got a bunch of places knocking on our door and now we'll have something to share.

Our second big change is, with the help of UT's communication office, we're updating our signage and logo's first you'll see some new signs out at the solar station. Some of our new logos are here. This went along with our website redesign that is hopefully a little more informative and up-to-date. Now that we're getting in a year's worth of data, look for some more research papers coming out of this system!

New Solar Powered E-Bike Station is Up (but not yet running)!

So, the new solar powered e-bike station is out on Ag Campus. This station is powered by ~1kW of solar arrays, run through an Outback Flexpower inverter and then to the batteries. An important part is that this station is off-grid so all of the operations and battery charging is done from solar! We pushed hard for about two weeks to get this finished, with most of station fabrication done at the Civil Engineering machine/fabrication shop and most of the electronics design and development done at the Biosystems Engineering Sensors and Controls Lab. We had a hardware/software problem when we hooked it all up that we're remedying now. We are up and should be running soon. Special thanks to students (Casey Langford, Taekwan Yoon, Ryan Overton, Levon Brassfield, Zane Pannell, and Kenric McKay) and staff (Stacy Worley, David Smith, Larry Roberts, and Ken Thomas) for the hard work, particularly near the end. We look forward to getting these bikes rolling soon. For now, check out the pictures of the fabrication at: http://bit.ly/H7HnxB

EV's (including e-bikes) need to pay attention to emission source

KNOXVILLE—Electric cars have been heralded as environmentally friendly, but findings from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers show that electric cars in China have an overall impact on pollution that could be more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles.
Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major Chinese cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. What Cherry and his team found defies conventional logic: electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars.

“An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles,” Cherry said. “Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to. Prior studies have only examined environmental impacts by comparing emission factors or greenhouse gas emissions.”
Particulate matter includes acids, organic chemicals, metals, and soil or dust particles. It is also generated through the combustion of fossil fuels.

For electric vehicles, combustion emissions occur where electricity is generated rather than where the vehicle is used. In China, 85 percent of electricity production is from fossil fuels, about 90 percent of that is from coal. The authors discovered that the power generated in China to operate electric vehicles emit fine particles at a much higher rate than gasoline vehicles. However, because the emissions related to the electric vehicles often come from power plants located away from population centers, people breathe in the emissions a lower rate than they do emissions from conventional vehicles.
Still, the rate isn’t low enough to level the playing field between the vehicles. In terms of air pollution impacts, electric cars are more harmful to public health per kilometer traveled in China than conventional vehicles.

 “The study emphasizes that electric vehicles are attractive if they are powered by a clean energy source,” Cherry said.”In China and elsewhere, it is important to focus on deploying electric vehicles in cities with cleaner electricity generation and focusing on improving emissions controls in higher polluting power sectors.”

The researchers estimated health impacts in China using overall emission data and emission rates from literature for five vehicle types—gasoline and diesel cars, diesel buses, e-bikes and e-cars—and then calculated the proportion of emissions inhaled by the population.

E-cars’ impact was lower than diesel cars but equal to diesel buses. E-bikes yielded the lowest environmental health impacts per passenger per kilometer.

“Our calculations show that an increase in electric bike usage improves air quality and environmental health by displacing the use of other more polluting modes of transportation,” Cherry said. “E-bikes, which are battery-powered, continue to be an environmentally friendly and efficient mode of transportation.”

The findings also highlight the importance of considering exposures and the proximity of emissions to people when evaluating environmental health impacts for electric vehicles. They also illuminate the distributional impact of moving pollution out of cities. For electric vehicles, about half of the urban emissions are inhaled by rural populations, who generally have lower incomes.
The findings are published in the journal “Environmental Science and Technology” here.

Cherry worked with Matthew Bechle and Julian Marshall from the University of Minnesota and Ye Wu from Tsinghua University in Beijing. The scientists conducted their study in China because of the popularity of e-bikes and e-cars and the country’s rapid growth. Electric vehicles in China outnumber conventional vehicles 2:1. E-bikes in China are the single largest adoption of alternative fuel vehicles in history, with over 100 million vehicles purchased in the past decade, more than all other countries combined.

This study is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The prestigious CAREER award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Cherry received his award in 2011. For more information, click here.

Safe bike riding class

The Knoxville Region Transportation Planning Organization is hosting a safe bike riding class next week. It is highly recommended that you attend this, particularly if you are one of our users. Here's the info.

Join us for a bike ride and a class on riding in traffic all in one!

Ride Smart class
Tues, Oct. 11
5:45 p.m.

Meet on the south (walkway) side of Hodges Library. Bring your bike and a helmet. You may want your headlight as well considering it gets dark early these days.


Kelley Segars
Principal Planner
Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization
400 Main St, Suite 403
Knoxville, TN 37902
(865) 215- 3815

Find Bicycle Program on facebook!
www.facebook.com/bikeknoxville

Seeking Volunteers!

We're seeking volunteers to participate in the pilot test. Sign up as a volunteer at www.cycleushare.com, on the volunteer tab. The pilot will be open to a relatively small number of people who will use the system as we monitor the system performance and use. There will be a number of requirements, including consistent use of the system over several months--we want to users to highly utilize the system. The pilot test is open to all students, faculty, and staff; particularly those with easy access to the system. There will be two stations, one at Presidential Court and one on Ag Campus. There will be NO cost for users, but you will be required to go through an orientation, allow us to monitor your use, and participate in activities of the research project. We are nearing the full launch of the system, with a few programming tasks to finish. Sign up right away as slots are filling fast.

E-Bike share taking shape during earth month

We have made significant (visible) progress in the past couple of weeks, pushing forward with assembling the hardware and wiring. We have a finished five-bike rack (with the exception of the ramp to step up to the platform, a mostly-complete kiosk, and some control software finished. A couple of hiccups on bike alignment etc, but nothing we can't handle. We are pushing hard to have this out in the real-world in the next couple of weeks, hoping to run it through the ropes with some actual beta-testers and learn some things before we go to work on the second station. Keep an eye out on UT campus and fill in the volunteer form on the website (cycleushare.com) if you are in the UT community and would like to be one of our early testers.