Idea #2 - Pedaling for Dollars

May 2007 – This idea was born from a desire to help the homeless

My friend Gerhard called this Pedaling for Dollars:

The Problem:

Imagine you're down on your luck. You're starving and want a meal, or you need a shelter for the night, or you need to call home and it's long distance to Winnipeg. Or you need a fix. Whatever, you need some cash.

Well at every bus stop around the city, there is a stationary bicycle – it's bolted to the sidewalk - and you get on it and start pedaling for say 30 minutes. Not too hard, but it takes a bit of work. It's cold and you warm up fast. You keep going because the meter shows that in 15 minutes you've generated five Canadian dollars!

(Okay - you're singing Dreamer by Supertramp - and you sound good, but read on.)

So after an hour (the system only runs for an hour continuously to give other folks a chance to use it) you jump off the bicycle and it spits out a card that's been credited with twenty bucks. Now you can take that into a convenience store or a bank and redeem it for cash.

The Solution:

So what is happening here?

Recently in British Columbia, our power provider BC Hydro, announced a program that would allow alternative power producers to sell power back to the grid.

The stationary bicycle mentioned above is a simple means to generate that power and it also happens to have a meter that can calculate the earning and create a credit card to transfer the funds. The dream side is that at the current rate for that power here in BC, our friend would have to, in Gerhard's words, “pedal his ass off for the better part of a couple months just to claim $10 in mileage points.”

That might mean this is simply an idea before its time. The homeless certainly aren't going away.