One thing I didn't understand here was, what exactly does Segway have to do with electric scooters in the first place? Why do scooters need the fancy self-balancing tech from the original Segway, or, if that's not what it's doing, what are they doing? Surely it's not something as lame as having a bunch of patents on the idea of sticking a battery in a scooter?
I think Segway is just the brand, seems to just have a button for acceleration. This article was a real eye opener for me, the Segway is just a horrible product. They sold 10x more kick scooters in a year than they ever sold Segways.
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 really don't know what's happening with Segway, but an antidote:
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.
"She was whizzing all over the place on it with ease and grace. It was an excellent sight."
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.
Walking is not a universal medicine for someone who has trouble walking. You don't see that person running to catch the bus because they can't. They might not even be able to get to the bus stop. They can't get their own groceries. Sure, you can try to tie this to some generic tangent about 'car culture' or whatever, but the idea that a person (whose health history you know nothing about) being able to exercise their autonomy is somehow a bad thing is pretty odd.
I think the argument being made is a lifetime of neglecting your body (poor diet, lack of exercise) leads to an inability to use your body, which in turn encourages you to use these assistive devices, which makes the problem worse still in a viscous cycle.
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.
Right, but there's nothing in the story posted that suggests this argument is relevant or appropriate - it's just judgy, tangential ranting. You can be the world heavyweight champion of walking and still end up disabled late in life.
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.
This comment is a totally unnecessary distraction. Yes, of course, obviously there's no statement that applies to literally 100% of the population, but that doesn't mean that we should alter everyday language to drone on with endless hedges and caveats in an attempt to cover every combination of human traits.
I know you’re coming from a good place, but I think it’s misguided.
we should alter everyday language to drone on with endless hedges and caveats in an attempt to cover every combination of human traits.
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.
Eh, I try not to judge too hard. Who knows? Maybe she got hit by a bus and lost the full use of her legs?
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.
That's right, that's definitely what he meant. It's funny how mobile operating systems have so dramatically changed the very nature of a typo into an autocorrected "wordo".
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!
Haha! Thanks, I did! Sometimes I think I have a mild speech impediment; other times, it's probably my brain's internal autocorrect before it comes out of my mouth (or out of my fingers, as it is)
Other than for people with limited mobility, can you help me understand why people think this is so? To me, it seems like evolution solved this problem for us when we became bipedal. It’s entirely possible (even likely) that I could just be a crank, but I genuinely don’t see the point of scooter rentals for healthy, sufficiently mobile people.
A scooter has about the same functionality as an e-bike but can go on sidewalks without seeming nearly as threatening. Use in bike lanes, go 4 times as fast as walking, no sweating like a bicycle, and more portable and much cheaper than an e-bike. If my commute is a mile from a train station on both ends, that is 40 minutes of walking a day. Probably good for your health, but cutting that down to 10 minutes by using a scooter could make trains much more useful for many people. Make it 2 miles on each end, then a bicycle is really needed. Bulky and not allowed on many subways. e-scooter could work just as well.
A person on a scooter is barely bigger than just a person. They stand maybe 4 inches higher. They are like like a person running. A bit annoying and going too fast, but not that big a deal. A bike going the same speed is a much bigger object.
You've clearly never seen a scooter clip a person's ankle and break it. I have. The point of contact is not torso to torso, it's metal to ankle.
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.
A fit person can walk at the speed of 3 mph or 5 kph, anything faster would be in jogging/running category. A electric scooter can easily each a speed of 12 mph or 20 kph - 4 times faster which is quite significant.
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.
My office is 3km from nearest Metro station in a hot humid country. If I walk it would take me 20-30 mins and I'll reach office tired and sweaty. Current scenario, my company provides cab that drives me 20 km in peak traffic. Alternate, I take a folding scooter, which I can carry in Metro and reach office in 10 mins still presentable.
I can commute by foot (which takes slightly over an hour), by bike (which takes 20 mins but leaves me noticeably sweaty), or by scooter which takes 20 mins and has no downsides. In practice, if I can't scoot then I drive a car because wasting 80+ mins a day or arriving everywhere sweaty just doesn't cut it for me. Buying a scooter has revolutionised my commute.
Speed. When that last mile is actually a mile and half, a 9-mph scooter will let you travel it from the train station in 10 min, which is reasonable in terms of time; whereas a half hour walk on top of your train commute time probably isn’t. It makes not driving much more viable in some situations.
I know it’s silly, but Americans won’t walk. The average single car trip in America is 5.95 miles long, with many rides falling into the 1-2 mile range. That is already easy biking range, and lots of Americans could walk that, but they dont.
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.
ohh another hot air bubble product.. "electric scooters" ... that will pass too.
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.
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.
At my hackerspace we charge our 18650 cells inside those green ammo boxes. Battery lockboxes are a way to stay pretty safe, even if a li-on, li-po, or lead acid battery explodes, in a steel box it can't do so much.
Obviously, doesn't help without removable batteries, which are more common on ebikes.
Korea is a lot more dense than California though and Korea has better public transportation to complement/supplement the scooters. The scooters are only going to work for people in denser cities. We need more high speed rail and mass transit options. These scooters are only a partial solution to a much larger and complex problem.
exactly. america is not just NYC&SF. Electric scooter is not going to solve bigger transportation infrastructure problem the one that really needs to be solved. I see at as a supplementary mode of transportation that will be MAYBE overall a 1% of the total solution.
Personal electric vehicles are completely symbiotic with public transit, that's why they're called "last mile" vehicles; because you take mass transit to within a mile or two, and then hop on your scooter, e-board, EUC to go the rest of the way.
I enjoy walking and cycling, but not for my commute. It takes an hour to walk vs. 20 mins to cycle or scoot. If I cycle I arrive unavoidably sweaty. My scooter is fantastic for commuting. When I want to walk, I go to the lake with my wife.
Electric scooters are easier to take on public transit than bicycles, and enable more trips without cars for people who are electric scooter close to a transit route on both sides.
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.
"What we really need is [large project x] and [public good y] so therefore no one should work on [other project z]" is a stale argument and even if some benevolent dictator got their way, wouldn't even work.
Little need for high speed rail when you’re talking about daily commuting. Personally may last five apartments have all been in short as in under five minute walking distance of a subway, that’s the advantage of living in high density areas.
I live in London, and I can tell you that you pay significantly more in order to be within 5 minutes of the tube. And some people want to have children and don't want them out on the streets in the city, so they pay significantly more in order to be close to fast rail links.
If you live, work and shop within five minutes of subways then you have no real use for a scooter. That isn't the case for most people, however. We can't all move to the big city.
That’s a fair point, but they are also rather useless in the ultra low density country or extreme urban sprawl. They are really only extremely spread out US style cities. Where, cars are almost useless, but you can’t really walk to everything useful.
High speed rail would allow people who live in Milwaukee and Madison to commute to Chicago, and vice versa. What is a 3 hour drive would become a 45 minute commute, which is reasonable considering the distance.
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.
High speed rail can’t do multiple quick stops. So, you can get to a city’s center with it, but acceleration and deceleration times plus station time means you are stuck with subways for in city use. You can’t use high speed rail and and a subway system to move very far and still have a 45 minuet commute.
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.
Come to Detroit where our only public transport options are "SMART" (slow) buses, the Detroit People Mover (a joke that barely circles a small area downtown), and the newly built Q-line that travels only a few miles straight back and forth.
IMO the addition of birds and limes has been really nice.
I ride my EcoReco electric scooter from Mountain View to Cupertino every day. It’s great and I don’t have to wait on buses. Are you going to spend billions to run a train from Mountain View to Cupertino? In the meantime, I have a heck of a fun commute.
... and yet scooters (and bikes) still work brilliantly for briandear, myself and thousands of other people - and at a much lower cost than driving a vehicle or installing rail.
Cars aren't the only way of getting to "the last mile." Closing the last mile has been public transit systems' problem for a long time.
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.
I think you may have misunderstood. I want cars gone. But the public transit system isn't good enough in many if not most places to warrant that, regardless of the last mile, so we should fix that first. Fixing that would change the world (incrementally).
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.
