<Paul> A Segway
A three month hiatus is pretty pitiful, even for a blog that isn't linked from the outside world and that has no readership to speak of. To help guide me out of my posting funk, I thought I'd post a non-Metro-although-tangentially-transit-related post.
The Segway scares me. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go enter "Segway" into Google and have a read; I'll wait. Welcome back. I'm terrified of the Segway because of the ridiculous amount of hype that preceded it; because it's masquerades as a geek-gadget although it's really a status symbol designed by rich people and being bought by rich people who aren't geeks at all; and because, after the photos that emerged this past weekend, it reminds me of that dumb guy that we call President.
What scares me most about this thing is that someone claims that Steve Jobs once said that people would "design cities around it." This is the type of perverse thought that brings comfort to Segway's investors but scares the bejeezers out of me. We built cities around cars, and we almost destroyed urban life in the process. A city built to the Segway-scale will be a city too large for pedestrian life; widened streets with Segway-friendly lanes will eat away at valuable sidewalk space; Segway "parking lots" will appear. And the homeless won't drive Segways. College students won't have their own Segways. Cities will be pleasant and accessible for rich and middle-class professionals; it will be too large and too populated by fast moving, good lookin' lawn mowers for anyone else's tastes.
I'm comforted by the fact that I'm a late joiner to the Segway backlash. Plenty of other people have commented on these negative points, most more eloquently than have I. San Francisco has banned them from sidewalks. And slashdot quotes today from the new book about Segway that Steve Jobs' first impression of the thing was that he thought it sucked, meaning that the earlier-reported quote was either apocryphal, or a warning.
And if Steve Jobs thinks it sucks, then I consider myself in pretty good company. </Paul> <!--10:02 PM-->
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