Rain drizzled on the tin roof of The Giddy Goat Coffee Roasters cafe as a group of Charlotte Bike Commuters shuffled in for their weekly meetup, Free Wheelin’ Wednesdays. Gathered around a table, they shared some of the issues bike commuters in the city faced, including safety education, bike lane connectivity and road debris.
“I’d say one of the biggest issues is all the litter just gets thrown into the bike lanes,” said Jim Mccarthy.
“It’s not so much litter, although there is some of that. But it’s the road debris, [the] gravel and little stones and sticks and piles of sand that accumulate in the bike lane,” said Gerry Kingsley.
The city does have its own electric sweeper — the so-called Sweepy McSweepface — but with at least 70 miles of bike lanes to sweep, that’s a lot of lane for one Sweepface to Mcsweep.
Ramez Tadros encountered this problem when he moved to Charlotte from Chicago about three years ago. He found himself using the same bike lanes day after day and noticed they were often filled with debris. He crowdfunded a couple thousand dollars and solicited local sponsorships from groups like Birdsong Brewing to purchase a towable bike lane sweeping prototype from California-based inventor Pierre Lermant.
Tadros calls it a people-powered bike lane sweeper, or PBLS (pronounced “Pebbles”) for short. PBLS sits in a brightly painted box at the Innovation Barn in Belmont. It’s connected to a freestanding solar panel, which charges the sweeper’s battery. Tadros opens the box and mounts the sweeper on the back of the bike.
PBLS looks like a towable tiller. It’s about the size of a lawn mower that hoovers up road junk and spews it out the side as the biker rides. The nonprofit Trips for Kids Charlotte donated a bike for people to use with the Sweeper, which Tadros stores in a bike locker.
“It’s got pretty rugged tires because, the way the sweeper works, you have to ride through the debris,” Tadros said. The sweeper rides squarely behind the rider, which means the biker must steer headlong into whatever they want to sweep.
PBLS in action
Rubble and dust from the road cover the green paint of a bike lane alongside East 10th Street that passes under Interstate 277. Tadros clicks on the sweeper, kicks off the brake and starts sweeping.
As Tadros rides, debris rattles around the inside of the sweeper before flying out the side.
“It’s like mowing the lawn,” said Tadros. “You can tell exactly where you swept.”
He said it usually takes a couple passes to clean a stretch of lanes.
“You definitely feel the resistance, but it’s as if you were pulling a kid or anything else,” Tadros said.
But for Tadros, it’s worth it to see the lanes he and others use kept clean. It also helps ease his anxiety about climate change, which sparked his career shift to solar manufacturing.
“This project with keeping the bike lanes clean also helps,” said Tadros. “If you have climate anxiety, just get involved and be active.”
Interested bikers can sign up online to use the sweeper. Bike Charlotte is hosting a “Be The PBLS Mileage Monarch” challenge for National Bike Month in May, in which bikers may compete to see who can sweep the most miles by May 12.
