Alternative Mobility Parade

I have this crazy idea to create an alternative mobility parade in Cape Town to showcase different types of technology, and to demonstrate to the public the reality of renewable energy resources (for example: pedal power, wind power etc).

When chatting about abstract concepts, I refer often to CAT (Centre for Alternative Technology-Check it out: //www.cat.org.uk/) a great place in the UK with the ‘largest range of installed renewable systems anywhere’ – a place you only hear of in hippy fairytales it seems, along with it’s incredible magical machines/set-ups that the average person’s imagination struggles to accept, for example, Photovoltaics or Solar thermal.

Seeing is believing my friends, and if we want to convince people that yes, they do need to make some drastic life changes to meet the environmental challenges we are facing, it is necessary that we SHOW and INVOLVE people!

The main idea behind all this is that we address the behavioural change issues that so often get in the way of positive change locally – so I recently had a realisation about people and decided: gimicky and quirky, humorous and fun is the way to go if we want to get peoples attention!

The concept for this Alternative Mobility Parade is as follows:

We want to create a local version of the Rinky-Dink, a pedal-powered mobile sound system that, as well as making music as you pedal, helps demonstrate power usage by showing the comparison between a normal bulb versus an energy-efficient bulb (and by cycling to power these lightbulbs you can learn for yourself how energy-efficient lightbulbs actually require less energy/pedalling for brightness!)

We would like to also demonstrate to the public the idea of a more walking- and cycling-friendly city. BEN.org have ‘Dynamos’ which harness power from bike wheels as you cycle and we are thinking we could hook these up to light bulbs (one energy-efficient and one non). Another option is that instead of using the dynamos, we could use rechargeable batteries charged by solar and LED bike lights’ to power the bulbs.