One of the reasons Segway failed (and what might stop electric scooter's expansion) is legal problems. A Segway wasn't a road vehicle, but it also wasn't legal on sidewalks either (in many places) leaving it in a legal grey area.
A lot of traffic codes have specific rules and allowances for bicycles. They're allowed on the road but without a lot of the normal requirements (license plates, registration, insurance, etc). Segway (and other similar new vehicles) have no such exception, but also aren't eligible for those things.
What I am getting at is, in some places, you could get a ticket for using a Segway on the sidewalk AND public road. Meaning it was essentially limited to private property only. That's a problem.
PS - Electric bikes kind of skirted around the law by looking and acting like a regular bicycle, and not exceeding their speed. But even that hasn't been without issues.
PPS - In some places Segways are legal via exceptions made for electric wheelchairs on sidewalks.
Does a Segway really take more space than a bike? Bikes are big. Like really big. They're far longer than a human is long, they carry momentum and cannot start or stop quickly, and they have a very wide turning radius so they can't maneuver around obstacles easily, which just increases their actual size. Meanwhile Segways, being electric, can start and stop on a dime, and can rotate in place to maneuver around obstacles.
I think the problem with Segways isn't their size, its their difficulty of operation. People bumbling around on Segways is the problem, not their size. Their size isn't really any wider than a average person's shoulder width. The average male shoulder width is 18.5", Segway is 25", which coincidentally is the same width as the average bike handlebars. Meanwhile a bicycle is as long as an average human is tall.
> Does a Segway really take more space than a bike? Bikes are big. Like really big. They're far longer than a human is long
The problem is that segways are wide, they take a lot of transverse space which is generally at a premium: at the scale of a street, length is infinite but width is limited.
Worse, they take that space very low on the ground which is more problematic: there are obstacles at ground-level which don't exist at handlebar-level and it's outside the normal field of vision.
> they carry momentum and cannot start or stop quickly, and they have a very wide turning radius so they can't maneuver around obstacles easily
That's an advantage for other people, because they can more easily estimate trajectories even not knowing the intents of the driver. There it helps a lot that bikes are familiar objects so people more or less know their range of behaviour.
I agree and disagree. Why are pedestrians so great? Because they're low speed, start and stop extraordinarily quickly, change direction extraordinarily easily, and two of them bumping into each other is extraordinarily unlikely to cause even the smallest amount of damage. Try to count the number of times you've seen two pedestrians do the dance trying to figure out who is going left and who is going right to pass each other... and then try to imagine a bike or scooter doing that. You can't, because they can't.
Segways almost can, though. They can stop hard and reverse direction very easily, then rotate on a dime.
Bike have a predictable momentum and direction, sure. But pedestrians don't, and pedestrians are used to having extraordinary flexibility when it comes to obstacle avoidance. If a pedestrian walks in front of a pedestrian, you stop and/or swerve and/or contort your body to get around them. If a pedestrian walks in front of a Segway, provided the Segway can't stop (which is unlikely), maybe they get bumped or knocked down, but the Segway would likely bounce back, meaning it stops moving forward. If a pedestrian walked in front of a bicycle, at least two people are likely to get extraordinarily injured. Even if the bike stopped in time, the biker has to secure themselves since they can't autobalance like a pedestrian or Segway.
Again, I think Segways get a bad rap because 1) they were new and expensive, so everyone wrote them off as self-indulgent and they never became common enough to shake that, and 2) many people using them don't know how to pilot them (Segway tours). Bikes and scooters are both far worse transport solutions for cities, and especially for sidewalks.
That's no doubt true, but I think the biggest problem was (and maybe is) price. They were something like $5K when they came out. I don't have hard data, but I'd be surprised if the median adult bike sold is more than $500 or $600. And the retail price of electric scooters seems to be $500.
In terms of sharing, too, I don't think it's a coincidence that the real ascension of bike and scooter shares is happening with smartphone penetration.
Segways have long been one of my go-to examples of how new tech that doesn't fit with existing infrastructure can have a lot of adoption challenges.
The company was certainly aware of it. Hence all their lobbying.
But they really don't fit well with roads, especially where there aren't bike lanes. And they're a poor fit for sidewalks, especially if you want to go faster than walking pace. (And, if you don't, I'm not sure what their point is.)
I just had a look. My average commute speed is 24kmh on an 8 speed bike. Segways have always looked a bit slow to me and their top speed is 20kmh from what I can find. I’m calling them way slower than a push bike.
I don't really have an opinion on how well Segways fit with bikes. However, especially at a time when there was generally less bike infrastructure than today, a lot of people weren't comfortable riding Segways on roads mixed with car and truck traffic. (Just as many weren't riding bikes there.) ADDED: Hence, why the company tried to get cities to allow them on sidewalks.
No argument. Which is why a lot of cities (rightfully) pushed back on Segway's lobbying. Fundamentally you don't want stuff that goes faster than a walking pace on a sidewalk. Of course, the main reason that people might want scooters, bikes, Segways, etc. is that they are faster than walking. Assuming you're capable of walking, an electric device that can't go faster than 3 or 4 mph isn't very interesting.
> A Segway wasn't a road vehicle, but it also wasn't legal on sidewalks either (in many places) leaving it in a legal grey area.
Correct. How are these scooters getting away with this though -- riding on the sidewalks that is.
Nearly half the scooters in San Francisco are being ridden on the sidewalks. I know cos I routinely get 'nearly run-over' by a hipster riding these on the sidewalk almost daily.
Probably sheer numbers in a city that's already overwhelmed by lots of other activities that people aren't supposed to be doing either. As others have noted, a lot of people like them but it's not clear that they are workable if they can never be ridden on the sidewalk.
I'm not condoning their use on sidewalks but it's probably inevitable that they'll be ridden there if they're going to be used to any great degree.
Indeed, and Seattle and San Francisco have put the brakes [sorry] on scooter and bike sharing temporarily while they get the legalities sorted out. It’s odd to see those two cities being more conservative about new tech dads than DC, but perhaps they’ve learned something. :)
Seattle has not "put the breaks" on bike sharing. Last year they removed the station based bikes, but there are now tons of bike sharing going on from Ofo, Lime, Pronto, and other competitors [1].
The existing dockless bike sharing companies were approved under a provisional permit, which has sunset. The city is gathering data and deciding where they want to go from here:
The thing to understand about San Francisco is that it's ironic. The whole thing, the city itself. It doesn't make any sense if you take it at face value, you need to understand that it's "bad" and "dumb" on purpose.
I mean, it's not even subtle. A city where shitting on the sidewalk (actual human shit) is commonly accepted and even appreciated as part of the local color, but a battery-powered scooter is a public safety crisis that requires emergency regulation? Come on.
At last in California, there are codes in place for electric vehicles, which should cover both scooters and Segways.
For what its worth, dockless rental electric scooters are a completely different game than electric scooters (which came out a few years before the Segway). The (game changing) advantage is that once you finish the ride, you don't need to worry about keeping it with you securely.
A lot of traffic codes have specific rules and allowances for bicycles. They're allowed on the road but without a lot of the normal requirements (license plates, registration, insurance, etc). Segway (and other similar new vehicles) have no such exception, but also aren't eligible for those things.
What I am getting at is, in some places, you could get a ticket for using a Segway on the sidewalk AND public road. Meaning it was essentially limited to private property only. That's a problem.
PS - Electric bikes kind of skirted around the law by looking and acting like a regular bicycle, and not exceeding their speed. But even that hasn't been without issues.
PPS - In some places Segways are legal via exceptions made for electric wheelchairs on sidewalks.