Ubicycle

When Jung Geun Tak moved to the United States from South Korea seven years ago, he bought a car and began driving where he once would have ridden a bike. “This allowed me to see how my culture helped to maintain my health and control traffic and pollution by using the bicycle,” Tak says. Ubicycle, a bike-sharing plan, was born a few years later, when Continuum, the Boston-based consultancy where Tak is a senior industrial designer, gave its staff time to pursue their own sustainable concepts.

Tak first imagined Ubicycle as a distinctive bike design available throughout the city, either through a membership plan like Zipcar’s or for a onetime fee. But he and his wife, Shinhyun Kang, who helped with the branding and graphics, expanded the idea to include a transit card to transfer onto buses, taxis, and subways, as well as parking facilities near transit, offices, and residential areas. “I focused on the number of bikes that could fit in the same space as one parked car because I wanted to reduce the carbon footprint,” says Tak, who is 34. His rack system can be combined to fit 14 bikes in one space. Individually, each module holds two bikes beneath a solar canopy that looks a bit like a tree. “It’s a metaphor for the city becoming green,” he says.