A cardboard bike? Indeed. Moses Znaimer’s 14th annual three-day conference was part of an afternoon focused on transportation innovation featuring a line-up of whiz-bang speakers who showed off the-future-is-here flying cars and super-fast evacuated tube travel, sold as “space travel on Earth.”

Wowing the audience, Izhar Gafni of Israel, highlighted a 28-pound (less than 13 kilograms) cardboard bike. Waterproof, rust-proof, made of renewable and recycled resources such as paper, plastic bottles and car tires, and able to support a rider 20 times its weight, Gafni’s invention costs about $9 to build.

“If it’s cheap, it’s affordable,” Gafni told Toronto Star feature writer Antonia Zerbisias. So far, it has won a 2013 Invention Award from Popular Science magazine and has been recognized by CNN, as well as a number of design companies, for its potential to revolutionize transportation.

His next move is to reinvent the wheelchair, to make a paper version so that more people can afford better mobility devices.