As a product it was very interesting, but it had pitfalls. It wasn't exactly clear where to store it. The people who saw it all had houses and garages, but for the everyday user in the city hard to figure out where you would put it after each use. Even bicycles are challenging to store in NYC, which is why Citibike is interesting.
The second problem and much larger was the price point. If you want something to succeed you have to price it so that you can gain mass appeal. The $5,000-10,000 price point is a dead zone. As consumers we almost never spend this amount of money.
We spend hundreds of dollars all the time.
We spend a thousand or two thousand dollars infrequently, but we do it. Computers, vacations, some furniture.
But when you get to $5,000+ that is a price we pay very rarely. It is actually more common to find something more expensive, such as $10,000+ for a car, then to find $5,000. As a result it was hard to figure out where that price fit in.
Also, no one thought of subsidizing the cost. With the iPhone, it's expensive, but you have the carrier to subsidize the cost and more importantly create a monthly payment plan. If you could at least convert $5,000 to some sort of monthly fee that would help.
So what they really failed at is distribution. In fact if they planned around distribution they could have actually jumped on the entire citibike, jump, etc market before it ever existed.
It would also mean that customers wouldn't need to pay $5,000 out of pocket and instead could pay per use or a monthly fee.
Often people discount distribution when it comes to product market fit and failures.
Lastly, riding a bicycle is rather awkward. Think about learning it as a kid. It's counter intuitive. A bike can't stand on it's own, you have to pedal to go, if you stop it falls over. Though it is extremely unintuitive, it is cheap, you can try it, it has a culture, and is a rite of passage. So we learn this behavior even though it doesn't make sense.
The Segway is also counterintuitive in some ways. Looking at people riding them, never gives you a sense of confidence. There are also plenty of videos of people falling off of them, similar to bicycles.
But with a much higher starting point you aren't really tempted to try it, or even have access to one to test it out to see if it becomes intuitive or not.
Lastly, our cities aren't designed for this type of commute. People drive, they can take the subway, but the number of people that commute outside of that on bicycles is small in the US. In Europe like in Amsterdam, the Segway takes up more space in a lane than a comparable bicycle, so it really wasn't an improvement. And since Americans aren't used to bicycles they though oh wow this is great! Europeans were like for $50-$150 one time I can have a bike that lasts forever, doesn't require charging, takes up less space, and I already own it.