How the Segway didn't change the world

Wow! Neon McSplody should really be wearing a “warp core breach imminent” warning.

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Somebody has to reclaim the word!

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And I thought it was the hoverboards that were explosive!

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Yeah, I mean, at first glance, it seems like a really useful product.
But what [useful thing] does it do* that an electric scooter doesn’t do?
(Which explains why the current Segway manufacturer currently manufactures scooters.)

*EDIT: I guess it performs much better on, say, grass or dirt. But how useful is this really?

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I think part of it was to use the commercial aspect to fund projects like the standing/stair-climbing wheelchair. I don’t know how that worked out

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The Segway had the same problem most high tech transportation solutions have, it cost a ton of money to not fill any niche better than existing tech for daily life. A car moves stuff better, a bike is more versatile and feet can generally handle stairs. On any metric people care about it was beaten by one or more widespread methods.

That really represents a small number of our cities. Most of the northeast and industrial midwest saw much of their urban fabric set out pre-car. Much of the sunbelt was developed well after the damage of auto centric development were obvious. Southern California is really the only area I can think of that had the core of their urban fabric set out in that period. We made a conscious decision to go back and bulldoze that early existing fabric or build in known bad patterns in most cases.

Some are, but the infrastructure bill looks like we are actually going to go backwards on our already paltry 80-20 highways public transit split.

Oh, so we should have excellent service between Hamburg/Cologne, or Cleveland/Cincinatti? There is no direct service between the the C cities in Ohio, with Columbus having no passenger rail of any sort, despite being a metro of 2 million. We use our size to hand wave away that we’ve chosen not to do the right thing, but no single line needs to connect the whole country, you can build regional networks that connect in major hub cities. There is a good sized city that could be served sensibly by rail matching most of the euro city dots on that map.

I didn’t know either, but this inspired me to go look. It struggled commercially for a while, but had a following. It went off the market in 2009. Regulatory changes and a concerted effort brought it back onto the market after a couple of year hiatus. The newest version was released about 2 years ago and while it is a niche product it seems to be getting along just fine.

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My god, has it been 20 years already? I remember turning on my TV that morning and seeing them riding around and thinking “Oh, it’s a fancy scooter.”

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47 posts and not this?

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Edinburgh-London has less congestion than Glasgow-London. If you aren’t travelling in the middle of the night then you will hit traffic jams at Birmingham and Manchester.

Another answer might be to break cities down into local areas, with convenient shopping. You are still likely to run into nimbyism, with astroturfing from the supermarket chains, but it should help cut down on car travel. Think of cities as federations of local areas rather than a monolith.

Localism isn’t the solution to everything, and has some problems of it’s own, but it does seem like an improvement on what we have right now.

I do find it odd that Wikipedia has localism labelled as (right-wing) Libertarian, when the main example of localism in the UK is the Preston model, which is the left wing of Labour (with a few exceptions).

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Basically this concept:

As with many nice things, in the U.S. it’s available mainly to people who can afford to live in affluent urban neighbourhoods (i.e. those that aren’t food deserts).

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Aye, but you hit traffic all the bloody time once you get past Newcastle and the A1 goes single-lane. God, I hate that road so much.

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In most of the US, city centers were designed pre-car, but the suburbs (where a large percent of each metro area lives) were designed around cars, and public transportation in the suburbs is spotty or non-existent. We’ve got food deserts all over our inner cities, because no one wants to invest there, but we have food deserts all over the suburbs and rural areas, too. If you apply the 15-minute walk mentioned by @gracchus to those areas, you’ll see it can be just as impossible for someone without a car to get to stores.
And a Segway, even with the panniers, can’t handle a grocery run.

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I don’t know that those are so much trendy, as heavily pushed by “share” economy startups willing to burn money till… Something.

In fact Lime uses Segway brand scooters that cost about a grand to buy outright.

In their city centers. The broader metro areas beyond 1st gen suburbs are mostly sprawly car centric places, as are the connections to surrounding areas and other cities. In fact we stamped the interstate system right through and over many of those older sections.

Cities aren’t static.

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They clearly are that way. My objection is to the idea that they got that way because their development occurred in that brief period of utopian car positive planning, where we didn’t know the cost. Prior to WW2 most development was focused on other methods. By the mid 70s highway revolts were in full swing all over the country. Anything outside that window has been done with a willingness to have someone bear that burden. When we act like it was an accident of history we absolve ourselves of looking at what policies are still actively reinforcing that pattern of development. As well as who bears the burdens and who reaps the benefits.

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I couldn’t understand anyone driving all the way from London to Edinburgh by car when there’s a train every hour whizzing there in just 4h20min, if not not for the sometimes absurd prices in British rail…

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gettyimages-83707500-612x612
It’s somewhat puzzling that Segways never really made it; they seem perfect for this day and age.

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There’s some stiff competition there.

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So are you trying to imply that as an Italian from Rome I could be considered some sort of EU “Florida Man”?

I’m deeply offended, my indignation mitigated only by the fact that, being also a Swedish national, I have some Canadian (Quebec?) overlap.

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Hm. This would put me in Ohio, not far from the border to Indiana.
And roughly at the same distance from Frankfort as I am now from Frankfurt.

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