Genius Inventions That Should be Implemented In Every City

Modern cities are as inspiring as they are problematic. Humanity faces ever-increasing challenges from mass urbanisation. How will we deal with this? Like we always do: with inventions.

Billions of dollars are being invested into creating the smart cities of the future and many enterprising companies have come up with inventions that benefit both cities and citizens. Let’s take a look at some genius inventions that should be implemented in every city.

21. Bright Bike Lanes

Cycling in any busy city can be hazardous, but there are ways city planners can keep cyclists safe. Take this bright idea from a town in northern Poland.

This bike path was created using thousands of tiny ‘luminophores’, a synthetic material that emits a low level of light for 10 hours, then ‘recharges’ itself during the day. The self-sufficient bike paths don’t require electricity and provide safety to those cycling at night, which is the definition of a win-win. And they look pretty amazing too.

20. Pedal Chargers

Around 20 different cities all over France have already implemented this exciting invention that allows you to charge your phone by using pedal power.

Mainly situated in train stations and airports, the "Bike & Charge" table created by sustainable energy company WeWatt aims to promote an active lifestyle while making sure your phone doesn’t die. Bike users can also enjoy free Wi-Fi.

19. Rolling Benches

While this may look like a modern version of an old-fashioned clothes dryer, it’s actually something that could keep your pants drier. The Rolling Bench was created by South Korean designer Sung Woo Park to solve the problem of soaked benches in city parks.

If the bench’s exposed surface is wet, you can just turn the handle to reveal the dry side, and your seat is ready. It's super simple stuff from South Korea, but a great solution to the tired legs versus swampy cheeks dilemma.

18. Speeding Ticket Robot

As any police officer will tell you, routine traffic stops can be dangerous and officers would rather conduct them from a safe distance. Enter the Speeding Ticket Robot. This real-life robocop allows officers to question drivers from their patrol car by use of an extendable arm on which the robot sits.

The robot has a camera scanner for documents and deploys a spiked arm in front of the offender’s wheels to stop them from fleeing. The robot can print and issue tickets, so just think of it like a Xerox machine with a badge. They even gave it its own helmet.

17. Adopt A Tree

Increasing the amount of trees, and hence the canopy of urban areas, is one of the most cost efficient and effective strategies for mitigating the urban heat island effect and adapting to climate change.

But lots of trees in major cities are dying out as they age or are crowded out by the concrete jungle. To incentivise tree planting, the city of Melbourne created the urban forest visual.

The website helps incentivise people to plant new trees. Different species of individual trees are marked by different symbols, and their color represents their life expectancy. This gives individuals and city planners the information needed to efficiently plant more diverse tree species.

16. Bus Fair

New York City is known for its heavy traffic, but imagine if you could change the traffic signals to your benefit. Surprisingly, the Big Apple’s new electric buses can do just that. Sensors in both the buses and traffic lights allow buses to either extend green lights or change red ones as they approach.

This prioritization technique has already led to a 20% reduction in travel times. The zero-emission buses are also charged via an overhead power arm that attaches to the roof for quick and easy turnaround. Taking the bus just got a whole lot faster.

15. Sensor Cities

The Internet of Things is a network of connected devices that communicate with each other through the internet, and a system like this could provide the key to smart city optimization.

Networks of sensors are already used to monitor air pollution levels and traffic concentration, but we could see these sensors extend into other areas, such as waste collection.

In Amsterdam, for instance, over 2,000 bins are equipped with sensors that tell waste companies exactly when the bin needs to be emptied. This ultimately reduces time spent emptying half-full bins.

This has made the city cleaner as overflowing bins are emptied on time. The uses for an IoT comprised of sensors are potentially limitless, which definitely classifies it as a genius invention.

14. VR Urban Planning

Picture this: there’s a large development going on in your neighborhood and you’re not sure how you feel about it. At the moment, it’s an ugly construction site, so how do you know what it’s going to look like?

UDLR studios have the answer in their combination of architecture blueprints and virtual reality. VR-enabled designs will allow locals and prospective buyers to immerse themselves in the finished building project, well before it’s completed.

The technology could help to solve community issues with urban planning and give potential pre-buyers a better idea of what their property might look like, inside and out.

13. Smart Street Lighting

As energy-saving ideas go, smart streetlights really live up to their name. These lights can adjust their brightness according to surrounding light intensity and can sense the movement of people and vehicles.

If there’s an emergency, streetlights can be increased to maximum levels for visibility, and they’ll also let engineers know if they’ve stopped working.

Smart street lighting has already seen widespread implementation in cities like Miami, Paris, and Madrid, which now boast between 225,000-500,000 connected streetlights each. New research shows that wider deployment of smart street lighting could save up to $15 billion by 2023. Talk about shedding light on inefficiency.

12. Internet Exchange Safe Zone

The online marketplace can be a treacherous place to purchase goods, but it’s often where the best deals are found. Sometimes people meet up in person to make an exchange, which can be even more dangerous. Fortunately, there’s a solution: the Internet Exchange Safe Zone.

The Cal Maritime Police Department in California has designated one of these safe zones outside their station so that people can trade their goods securely under the watchful eye of a CCTV camera. Local governments in the US have already made their own exchange safe zones in response to a spate of meet-up related crimes.

11. Intelligent City Trees

Air quality control is a serious problem for cities, but the German company Greencity Solutions could provide an answer. This is the City Tree, which the company claims as the world’s first biotech air quality filter.

The large green installation, which doubles as a bench, uses specific moss cultures to filter out particulates and nitrogen oxides. The CityTree has a fully automated water and nutrient supply that utilizes IoT technology to decide exactly what the plants need, while also monitoring nearby air pollution.

According to the WHO, 7 million people die per year from air pollution, so what exactly are we waiting for?

10. Solar-Powered E-Tree

They say that money doesn’t grow on trees. But electricity can, according to Israeli company Sologic, who have invented a tree-shaped arrangement of solar panels. The tree generates electricity but also provides a shaded area with benches, free Wi-Fi, charging points and a water trough for animals.

The tree also lights up at night and has a useable LCD screen, which has proven popular with locals in Bethlehem. The eTree now has locations in China, the US and France, and part of its genius is that it seeks to blend renewable energy and community into a shared space.

9. Autonomous Goods Trains

One of the main problems in highly urbanized areas is the presence of large, noisy, polluting vehicles delivering goods; but since we’ll always need goods, how can we change this situation?

The concept video below by Volvo proposes a goods train made up of self-driving carriages that can split off and recouple according to the changing needs of suppliers and customers.

The electric carriages would be charged up as they are loaded and unloaded, reducing emissions and downtime. The idea itself is pretty revolutionary and would take a lot of investment to develop, but the potential increase in efficiency and ecology would certainly be worth the money.

8. Neon Traffic Poles

Ukraine has employed a simple but effective solution to traffic light visibility: LED signal poles. The bright green and red signal poles make it hard to miss a change in signal, but they also look very futuristic.

They’re useful if a large vehicle is blocking your view or if you’re too far forward at an intersection. The aim is to reduce road rage and cut the time in which vehicles remain at a standstill after the lights turn green.

7. Smart Parking Spaces

Parking in cities like London, Amsterdam, or San Francisco can be a nightmare, but would it be so hard if you knew exactly which spaces were available?

Smart parking company ParkEagle offers a solution in the form of a smart sensor that can sense if a space is free or not. The sensors can also communicate with one another to check for spaces where there aren’t any sensors.

They then send this information to users so they can navigate to a spot via ParkEagle’s app. The app could potentially reduce emissions and wasted time as drivers will spend less time searching for a spot.

6. Wastewater Filter Nets

Plastic pollution is a serious worldwide crisis, but this mini-city in Western Australia may have found a small-scale solution. Residents of Kwinana attached large nets made by the company Storm Water Systems to two large drainage pipes in order to protect the nearby Henley Wildlife Reserve from plastic pollution.

The nets collected 815lbs of trash in just a few months, and only cost the city US$13,900 to design, manufacture and install. This simple, cheap, and effective solution demonstrates how easy it can be to reduce plastic waste, and the idea will surely net big investments in the future.

5. High Heel Grilles (Grates)

High-heel wearers in cities everywhere can finally relax. No more will you have to worry about getting your heel stuck in a grate, and possibly having to take the whole grate home, like this girl did.

With the thoughtful steel footpads below, which are commonplace in Calgary and parts of New York, you can stride over those metal death traps with confidence. Are these really necessary? You bet your stilettos they are.

4. Train Foot Spa

Whenever I’m on a speeding intercity train, this thought always pops into my head: ‘I could really use a foot spa’. As it turns out, the Japanese train companies had the same thoughts and turned my dream into a reality.

I give you the Toreiyu, a high-speed train that features two soothing footbaths, each 2.4m long and able to sit four people side by side.

Every traveler is allowed 15 minutes of relaxation and gazing out of the window with feet submerged. The foot spa is designed so that water cannot splash out even when the train sways hard.

3. 3D Train Floor

For many people working in cities, the daily commute can be a real bummer. But would staring at the carriage floor be so depressing if it had a watery 3D ripple effect?

To promote a University-Level Olympics competition in 2017, the Taiwanese subway replaced its flooring with tracks and fields from various sports, including the surface of a swimming pool.

The successful campaign boosted morale and increased attendance at the event, which shows how even temporary esthetic changes can generate lots of fun, as well as funding.

2. Skyrise Greenery

There are many reasons why Singapore is a model city, but one of the things that makes it so beautiful is its use of vertical gardens. The Tree House is arguably the best example of this, ever since it set a Guinness World Record in 2014 for being the world’s largest vertical garden.

The lush foliage on the outside of the building filters out pollutants and the insulation provided by the plants massively reduces the building’s cooling costs, saving up $19,000 per year.

This vertical green lung is an excellent example of the kind of things smart cities will need to introduce in the future – not because of any particularly complex technology, but because it acknowledges the need for clean air and vegetation in the urban environment.

1. PaveGen

Are you tired of your sidewalk not doing anything useful? Well, this company has come up with a ground-breaking new way of using your footsteps to generate electricity. PaveGen states that their electromagnetic induction technology uses compressible tiles to generate around 5 watts of energy per footstep.

That is enough to run an LED streetlamp for 30 seconds. The company also collects footfall data that can be used by retail businesses and advertisers for specific ad-targeting, so walk on it at your informational peril.

I hope you were amazed at these genius inventions that every city should implement. I bet you'd like to see these ideas used in your city or town. For more genius ideas, you might want to read this article about genius ideas that should exist everywhere. Thanks for reading!