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.
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.