Forgot your wallet? Drop and give me twenty!
Posted on by Kolbe
Russia is hosting the upcoming Olympic games and they are taking things seriously! It seems that having their Olympic athletes in shape is not enough; they want their everyday subway commuters to jump on the fitness train rather than just their subway car. Moscow has outfitted their subway terminals with machines that provide a new way to get yourself a subway card. Should you forget your wallet, find you are short on cash, or just plain don’t want to pay for your subway ride, you can opt to do thirty squats in exchange for a subway ticket. Now, if you’ve ever played a fitness game on Nintendo Wii, I’m sure you’re thinking there has to be a way to cheat this and get the card without doing the squats. Doesn’t seem to be the case. The ticket machines are built with cameras that track your movement so they know if you are phoning in those squats or not. If you suck it up and do thirty actual squats, congratulations, you ride for free! I personally think this is a great idea. It promotes fitness and gives people a way to make mass transit even cheaper than it already is. I suppose the only potential downside is that you may have trains filled with sweaty, out of breath individuals…well, that is until they “pay” for enough subway tickets that they are all in shape. Sounds win/win to me, it would be nice to see something like this in our major cities.