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"It was [H.G. Wells'] adolescent fiction, his imaginative stories, that live forever - and yet are not acknowledged in literature classes as being great literature. So to hell with the academics!"
- Greg Bear

Flywheel Cycle  
  A motorcycle powered by a flywheel.  

A very Eco-friendly solution.

We froze, rigid, as a pair of flywheel cycles moaned and skidded to a stop by our car. Only the police used these since they move a good deal faster than the peat-powered steamers. They are tricycle affairs with a great heavy flywheel encased between the rear wheels. They plugged them in at night so their motor-generators could run the flywheel up to top speed. During the day the flywheel generated electricity to drive the motors in each wheel. Very efficient and smog-free. Very dangerous.
Technovelgy from The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge, by Harry Harrison.
Published by Pyramid in 1970
Additional resources -

John Brunner used the same idea with buses in his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar:

Across the hugely enlarged sidewalks the people thronged like insects, milling at the access points to underpasses and the subway. On the central, official-business-only emergency lane prowl cars cruised or paused, occasionally pulling over to make way for ambulances and fire trucks. Either side of the centre, the huge humming buses without engines—drawing their power from flywheels spun up to maximum revolutions when they turned around at the end-points of their journey—hauled their loads of up to two hundred passengers, sliding at two-block intervals into pickup bays and allowing the electric cabs to overtake. No internal combustion engine had been legal in the city since they put up the dome; the disposal of CO2 and anthropotoxins from the people themselves was as much as the ventilation system could handle, and on warm days their exuded moisture sometimes overloaded the conditioners, precipitating a kind of drizzle underneath the dome.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge
  More Ideas and Technology by Harry Harrison
  Tech news articles related to The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge
  Tech news articles related to works by Harry Harrison

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