This artist built a bike device that gets harder to pedal in expensive neighborhoods
Brooklyn artist Justin Blinder created a device attached to bikes that adjusts pedaling resistance based on local housing affordability. The Ground Truth project uses official US rent-burden data to make riding harder in pricier areas.
Brooklyn-based artist and technologist Justin Blinder first conceived of his art project Ground Truth in 2020, shortly after being laid off just before COVID-19 lockdowns began. To make ends meet, he started delivering food by bike and noticed how dramatically neighboring areas could differ economically and psychologically, despite being close together. He also observed that higher elevation often correlated with more desirable, expensive housing, thanks to better views and lower flood risk.
These observations gradually evolved into an idea connecting the food he delivered, the buildings he passed, and the tipping expectations he formed, with the underlying economic conditions of each neighborhood.
How the device works
Ground Truth is a small gray box that attaches to a bike's front fork. It changes how physically hard the bike is to pedal depending on how much of local residents' income goes toward housing. In more affordable areas, pedaling is easier; in areas where housing costs consume a larger share of income, the device increases resistance.
To avoid legal complications, Blinder avoided altering a bike's internal electronics and instead built an external mechanism. Using a Citi Bike as his test platform, he found the front brake lever was physically exposed, allowing him to build a wireless mechanism that acts as an additional brake actuator.
The hardware includes a microcontroller, a GPS module, a precise servo motor, and an SD card reader for local data storage. The device operates entirely offline, without logging or transmitting the rider's location.
The data challenge
The hardest part of the project turned out to be sourcing appropriate housing data. Blinder settled on a US government survey dataset tracking rent burden, using both the median share of income households spend on rent and the percentage of renting households spending at least half their income on housing.
Test rides produced some unexpected results: bikes moved faster through neighborhoods with a lot of city-managed public housing, while some luxury towers legally required to include affordable units complicated the picture. Blinder said it can sometimes be genuinely difficult to determine what counts as affordable.
He is now considering ways to make the project more socially interactive and to incorporate additional datasets addressing other urban and socioeconomic issues.
