Imagine if SmartBike was paying you for your pedal power. Flickr photo by afagen.

Via Inhabitat, I see that Chiyu Chen, a student at the Royal College of Art, has designed what must be the most awesome bike-sharing technology ever. Using the same technology that the Prius has to recapture the bike’s kinetic energy (Inhabitat seems to imply the energy is generated from pedaling while the Christian Science Monitor says it’s from braking), the bike generates energy and then feeds it back into the power grid once you return the bike. You then get a credit for how much you generated.

So this is a technology that takes all the benefits of bikesharing, then adds in completely renewable and clean power generation and gives you a discount the more you use it. Maybe Inhabitat’s slogan, “design will save the world,” is true after all.  Let’s get this to mass production ASAP and use it for those 1,600 SmartBikes we’re hopefully going to build.

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