I’m often asked how the idea of a pull-behind bike lane sweeper came about…
Circa fall 2020, Covid was forcing people to spend a lot of time at home, yet my office was opened and I took advantage or our sunny California weather to ride my bike to work once or twice a week, about 10 miles each way.
I noticed that the bike lanes painted on the side of the main streets tended to accumulate debris pushed by the car and truck traffic. I was even more surprised to pass ongoing construction sites where the adjacent street pavement had been swept, but not the bordering bike lanes. I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be nice to build a device I could pull with my bike to clean commuters’ routes?” Et voila! The Bike Lane Sweeper project was born.
Over the following 2 years I experimented with different configurations, starting with 2 by 4 wood studs and a chain driven DC motor. My friend Scott Aker lent me a hand and built a steel welded frame that enabled more elaborate configurations. Countless hours were spent testing different models, brushes, motors, wheel sizes, towbar attachments etc … The driving force has always been to keep the sweepers relatively simple, light, compact and easy to pull. The key invention is to suspend the brush with a spring so there is little contact between the spinning brush and the ground. It makes for very easy pulling, even with a conventional bike, and allows the brush to closely follow the contour of the pavement for an effective sweeping with little effort.
In the summer of 2023 Kiel Johnson from BikeLoudPDX.org reached out to me. He manages a bicycle open parking garage that he was hoping one of my sweepers could help him keep clean. I shipped the now called pickup V1 to Portland in August 2023. It was equipped with an electric hub motor encased in the brush core, an on/off hard switch attached to the frame of the bicycle, and a small hopper that would dump in the back by rotating it with a handle. Riding it through the streets of Portland alongside fervent bike advocacy group members brought a smile and encouragement from all the public along the way. A was very encouraging and motivating trip!
Along the way, Cedric Eveleigh was also thinking of a better way to clean roadsides in the Sunshine Coast, north of Vancouver, and he called me when his google search led him to bikelanesweeper.com. Cedric is an avid mountain biker and the inventor of the award-winning Supre Drive. His skill set, his dedication and his full-fledged mechanical shop proved to be all the project needed to spark a new round of innovations and start productization of the proof-of-concept prototypes. Cedric documented what happened next in a separate blog.