Segway was supposed to change the world. Two decades later, it just might
cnn.com
cnn.com
What I got from the article, was that a Segway is a 3 wheeled car with a joystick in stead of a steering wheel. The kick scooter is just easier to use, simpler to make, cheaper, more efficient, more reliable, more stable and safer.
This might be a fad, but it's much closer to a usable product than the Segway will ever be.
I was at the grocery store, and an older lady was riding one of those cheap-looking hover board type contraptions inside the store - except that there was a post, and seat attached to it. She was whizzing all over the place on it with ease and grace. It was an excellent sight.
Definitely an antidote to making them “cool”.
As for my other post—like all comedy, not everyone is going to like every joke. It amuses me that some people think that because they didn't recognise the comedy genius (perhaps it wasn't clever enough) their reaction is to get the endorphins hit that comes from hitting the down-vote button.
Personally I'm glad that I was able to contribute to the regulation of other people's brain chemistry. Hopefully I can make more people feel better about themselves with this post too. Press that button, people!
I was in a country other than the United States and I saw an older lady run to catch a bus. She was easily 65, maybe 70. It was neither interesting nor noteworthy to any of the other (swiss) people on the street with her.
Walking is the universal medicine and we live with an enormous burden of health, fitness and longevity problems (including obesity, diabetes, "lower back problems", knee and hip issues, etc.) due to the car culture that we live in and the related near refusal to walk anywhere.
No, this was not an excellent sight - it's the sign of a sick society that will do anything to avoid the simple, free and easy remedy to almost all of their problems.
A biological analog would be Type II. You consume too much glucose, you develop insulin resistance, you take insulin, which makes your insulin resistance worse, and so on. The problem there too, is diet and exercise.
I know you’re coming from a good place, but I think it’s misguided.
I'm not sure how you get that from anything I said. I'm saying that 'lol, yanquis are fat' is not a sensible response to some random story about a person making good use of assistive technologies. It seems like a totally unnecessary distraction that comes from not-a-good place.
It took me years to recover from being bedridden for 3.5 months. Recovery involved enormous amounts of walking, many hours a day, in fact, for long periods.
The easy answer may get you to the grocery store, but it won't restore function.
The rest of your post, I generally agree with - I walk, or ride a bike everywhere. It's been a great while since I've owned a car - best decision of my life was to get rid of it, and I agree that walking is excellent exercise that we all should try to do more. I can only encourage others to try to do the same.
I see all kinds of people riding exercise bikes in gyms. May they should switch to non-electric scooting instead.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-drift-w1-experience-s...
https://www.amazon.com/Koowheel-Electric-Balancing-Hovershoe...
A 10 minute walk becomes just under 3 minutes on a scooter, and the time saving adds up over longer distance: Suppose you live 3 miles from the closest bus/train stop, it would be an hour on foot which is not practical for daily commute; 15 minutes on a scooter, however, is much more manageable and be competitive with driving.
Plus they are pretty fun to ride.
without seeming nearly as threatening
Scooters are viewed by the riders as less dangerous than bikes. Result: they take more risks, especially risks to pedestrians.
They are like like a person running.
It's common here for scooter retrievers to stack multiple scooters crosswise on the driven scooter's floorboard when carrying back for charging or deployment, making it a 3+ foot wide wrecking platform.
If electric scooters change that, even only for the able bodied who don’t need to carry a ton of gear, it would be huge.
Also, the prices of Segway kickscooters from Bird and Lime (1$ + 0.15$/min) seem way higher than Mobike's prices (around $10/month, unlimited rides).
what we really need is updated modern public transportion network, high speed electric trains/ efficient transportation hubs..... not bicycles and scooters LMAO !! This is a 21st century! Why are we going backwards? They make a good toy though.
IMO the addition of birds and limes has been really nice.
Cost of living drops off as you leave metro areas. Like another responder to your comment noted: people pay for convenience. I'd say cost is a disadvantage of living in a high-density area.
So, now you need to live near HSR and your job also needs to be next to HSR in order for that trip to work.
Electrified personal transport can help with the last mile but it's of no use if you never get to the last mile without a car.
Also, it's a scooter, "change the world"? If they mean by changing it from having x scooters on the market to x+1 scooters on the market then yes.
Cars changed the world. If scooters change the way people think about public transit and distance within cities, it could very well change how people consider where to live and how to organize cities.
Scooters have been around for literally decades, even electric scooters have been around for a while. Changing people to accept a bit of physical effort to get to their job, be it cycling, walking or electric scootering, is probably a great thing, but it won't solve the underlying lack of infrastructure.
You can't organise around infrastructure that isn't there. In cities where it is there, people use it even without electric scooters and people already move to be close to good public transport.
Public transport is terrible in my city, but it's really because the population is too low to support anything better rather than because of any particular problem with the service. There's no fix, except to somehow increase population density by a factor of five.
Any proposed improvements are likely to take years or decades to complete, too. Meanwhile you can stop driving and start scooting tomorrow.
It's also worth noting that scooters are great for much more than just the last mile. I commute 20 km per day on my scooter.
Walking is much slower, of course.
I don't live in California and the amount of electric scooters I've suddenly seen out of nowhere is crazy. It might be a fad, but unlike you, I'm more like 30% thinking it is a fad vs 100%.
My reasoning:
* Batteries have gotten better than even the basic Segway days
* The scooters are portable. You can fold them and take them in to your dorm, apartment, etc, preventing theft. A lot of work places won't complain about you charging them at work either
* The entry level price is so much lower. I never saw a casual person on a Segway, but I see casual people on the electric scooter bandwagon already
* There is also a large subset of folks that had Razor scooters. I wasn't part of that, but I can understand them being more willing to adopt if they had previously used unpowered scooters.
* Running in to someone might be a problem on San Francisco sidewalks, but it isn't on, say, ISU's sidewalks.
These scooter batteries sustain intense charging and discharging cycles, I won't bet my house and life on it.
Obviously, doesn't help without removable batteries, which are more common on ebikes.
More than anything else, people actually taking public transit enables more spending on public transit, and more spending on building public transit accessible housing and workplaces, both of which will again encourage more use of public transit.