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Yea or Nay? The Alpen Bike Capsule, "A Proper Home For Your Bike"

Does it do a good enough job of integrating into its surroundings--and does it need to?

By Rain Noe - November 25, 2019

in Bikes

If there's a topic we've covered a lot on this blog, it's bike storage:

- 9 Ways to Store a Bike Indoors

- Designing for Bikes Stored on Walls

- Small Space Challenge: Storing Bicycles Indoors

- Removable Handlebars for Easier Bike Storage

- The Parkis Automatic Vertical Bicycle Rack

- Compact, Overhead Bike Storage

However, most of those designs are focused on storing bikes indoors. Entrepreneur and outdoorsman Eric Pearson reckons that cyclists would prefer to reclaim the indoor space taken up by their rides, and his company, Alpen, aims to enable that with their freestanding Bike Capsule storage structure:

The rotomolded, lockable, rustproof and UV-resistant Bike Capsules can be bolted to the ground to make them theftproof, though details of installation are hazy.

Here's what it looks like in use:

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It seems a little odd outside of an urban or suburban residence, though it certainly looks weathertight:

The idea of integrating these into parking structures sounds good on paper, but none of the renderings below show the Capsules with any parked cars around them, which would certainly complicate removal and insertion:

I'm not in the target market, as I haven't touched a bicycle since moving out of Manhattan last year, but I know many of you are. Would you plunk down $1,000 to own one of these, can you see it fitting within your current set-up?

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Mark Roberts

5 years ago

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Can you say landfill? Why in the world would any designer design something so marginally useful, only to throw it in to a landfill in a short time.

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Donald Jones

5 years ago

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Doubles as homes for the Homeless in a pinch.

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Derek Chan

5 years ago

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In terms of security that lock is really the weakest link. As a storage shed where only you can get to it maybe but 1k is too pricey.

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