"The Shweeb train could be a solution to the crowded streets in big cities like New York, Shanghai or Hong Kong." (Image by Schweeb.)

If Google is going to dominate the world and plant chips in our brains, the least they can do is invest some of the company’s vast wealth on fun and ridiculous projects. And that’s apparently what they’re doing. According to an article in Spiegel, Google has poured a cool million into the New Zealand company Shweeb, which has developed a cycle-powered monorail. Pedal-powered recumbent bicycles hung from a monorail track? Sign me up. Here’s an excerpt from Holger Dambeck’s Spiegel piece:

“Shweeb’s inventor, Geoff Barnett, is already looking beyond the park though. In his opinion the Shweeb train could be a solution to the crowded streets in big cities like New York, Shanghai or Hong Kong. Barnett took his concept to Google’s Project 10100 (10 to the power of 100). Google was looking for ideas that could change the world by helping as many people as possible. Out of 150,000 entries, 16 were chosen. After this Google users were able to decide which five ideas should be given money by Google. Shweeb was one of the winners.

Barnett got the idea for the pedal-powered monorail when he was living in Tokyo. He was impressed by the crowds of people, the punctual trains, the ubiquitous vending machines and the capsule hotels, where guests stayed over night in what were basically glorified cupboards. On the Shweeb website, Barnett says that: ‘The idea of riding above the traffic jams on multi-level rails seemed to me the only possible way that Tokyo’s millions of residents could move around the city quickly and safely.'”