Tourists and local residents embraced it, recording more than 140,000 trips in four months. But a city count found that just 30 percent of passing Hubway users wore helmets.
That’s a far cry from the 72 percent spotted wearing helmets while riding their own bikes, and it came despite efforts by the city to make helmets cheap and accessible by persuading retailers to carry steeply discounted helmets, sold at or near the $7.50 price that helmet-maker Bell reserves for nonprofits and government.
Much of Hubway’s allure is its immediacy, making even that side trip to the store - or the prospect of being saddled with a helmet after returning the bike - inconvenient for some users, said Nicole Freedman, who runs the city’s Boston Bikes program, which oversees Hubway.
The HelmetHub prototype features a touch screen similar to those on Hubway rental kiosks, draws power from solar panels, and occupies half the space of a soda machine. And it works, dispensing helmets that adjust to fit most head sizes.
Freedman and the students envision them as sale-and-rental kiosks, allowing those who purchase helmets at the $8 Hubway partner price to return them for a partial refund. They are talking about developing a beta version that could be ready for testing by Hubway riders as early as next summer.
“What the MIT students have done is fantastic,’’ said Freedman, who connected with the students after visiting the product-design class’s ideas fair in September, where people with interesting problems vie for the attention of student teams.
Along the way, Freedman checked out a cardboard mock-up and on Dec. 1 lent the students a Hubway station, after Boston’s bike-sharing system went into hibernation for the winter.
When Freedman saw the finished product two weeks later, she was amazed but not at all surprised, knowing better than to underestimate what a dozen MIT students can do in a few weeks, with little sleep.
