Keen-eyed Sunshine Coast commuters may have seen the latest prototype of a new invention being tested on the highway.
In late September, Cedric Eveleigh, a director of Transportation Choices Sunshine Coast (TraC), began testing the most recent version of a bike lane sweeper that’s pulled by a bike.
As Eveleigh was sweeping the shoulder of the highway by hand at TraC’s action nights, where volunteers clean bike lanes once a month for safety and awareness, he considered more efficient ways to sweep than by hand or with large sweeper vehicles. He turned to Google and found a software engineer in California working on a design. Eveleigh reached out to Pierre Lermant and offered his help as a mechanical engineer whose business manufactures bike parts, and the two began to collaborate.
After several months of brainstorming, Eveleigh built the 3D model of the latest prototype, and Lermant came up to the Sunshine Coast for three days to see it in action.
“It has been quite the adventure,” Eveleigh said. “And it’s remarkable how well it works.” While sweeping by hand might take 10 people a whole day to complete a section, Eveleigh said a ride in the same area with the Bike Lane Sweeper can take one person two hours.
Since they started testing the Bike Lane Sweeper, Eveleigh says it’s making bike lanes safer and more enjoyable with each ride. The creators have prototyped two types of sweepers, and both designs can attach as a trailer to any kind of bicycle with an adjustable hitch (though Eveleigh recommends an e-bike for towing it uphill). The pick-up sweeper collects debris into a bin to be disposed of later and is made with urban settings in mind. For more rural locations, such as the Sunshine Coast, an angled sweeper pushes the debris off the road. The brush is electrically powered, with a wireless on/off switch on the handlebar, reducing drag.
Eveleigh’s company Lal Bikes will eventually be the contract manufacturer of the product. While he anticipates the cost per unit to be higher than what the average cyclist may spend, Eveleigh says “for municipalities concerned, it’s going to be dirt cheap” compared to sweeper trucks that are costly and can disrupt traffic. And, he adds, it's more eco-friendly.
On Nov. 2, Eveleigh introduced the prototype to the TraC Active Advocacy event in Roberts Creek. The demo picked up scattered pine needles — usually slippery to cyclists — but the team is still tackling half-decomposed leaves. The following weekend, Eveleigh transported the latest Bike Lane Sweeper prototype to Portland, Oregon, where BikeLoud PDX is conducting an extended trial period in the city’s bike lanes. They’ll experiment with collecting debris in biodegradable bags in the sweeper, which will be left at the side of the road for the city to pick up. In the meantime, he will build another prototype to refine the design based on feedback from Portland.
On his many rides with the Bike Lane Sweeper in tow on the side of the Sunshine Coast highway, Eveleigh could hear people cheering him on. The community support, he said, has been loud and clear.
Find out more about the invention at https://bikelanesweeper.com/
