This morning the Instagram Shorts algorithm decided I needed to spend the next couple of hours deep in a research hole about Shweeb, an electric-assist pedal-powered personal monorail pod last-mile public transit solution that promised to make commuting fun and easy. The only place you can actually try the Shweeb is at an adventure park in New Zealand, so it’s safe to say that the program didn’t take over the world as it was meant to, but it looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
As a point-to-point system or an aerial tour kind of fun attraction, I could really see Shweeb’s potential, though. Google gave Shweeb a ton of money and conducted a feasibility study for installing this transit system at its headquarters campus in Mountain View, California. I would love to be able to run one of these alongside a coastal road for a gorgeous afternoon workout, for example, but relying on one to get where I need to go probably wouldn’t ever work.
The zero-emissions transit startup had a stratospheric rise which included seven-figure contracts with Google and the Olympics, followed by a catastrophic fall. While there are many transportation problems that can’t and shouldn’t be solved with an interconnected series of pedal-powered monorail pods, the system itself brings about a dozen new problems. Probably the biggest downside is that you can’t overtake a slower rider in front of you. You can gently ease into the back of them and provide assistance to speed them up, but you’re stuck behind them regardless. There’s also nowhere to carry cargo or a young passenger, you can’t get away with wearing a skirt, dress, or kilt unless you’re into voyeurism, and the system is ludicrously expensive for municipalities to implement compared to a standard bike lane. It’s nice that these pods are isolated from the weather, and electric assist makes hills a non-issue, but alas.
Electric-assist makes the Shweeb more sensible, but still far-fetched
It seems that Shweeb has gone totally defunct and the New Zealand adventure park owns the rights to the system. There are a few other parks looking to install a system like this as an alternative to something like a zipline or an alpine coaster, which makes a lot of sense. I would definitely pay a couple bucks to ride around a roller-coaster-like course at 30 miles per hour for a handful of minutes. The little pod swings back and forth with the lateral forces, which allows the pod to whip around corners at speed. From the numerous onboard videos I watched over breakfast this morning, it seems like a futuristic fun time. Maybe we need more futuristic fun times in our lives right now, and we have let Shweeb down as a species.
In the parallel universe where Shweeb lived on as a massive infrastructure project stretching from San Diego to Seattle, I hope they’re having a fun time living my dream.