The author, doing a little off-roading

One glorious summer, KC lost his driver's license, and his immediate response was to buy three gas-powered scooters. All summer, KC, Monkey Boy, and I terrorized the town in our own little scooter gang. Sometimes Singular and other girls would be a girl scooter gang. We got to where we could do tricks, like little jumps and drops and such. These kids with Razors don't know what they're missing- and the geezers with electric putt-putt cruising scooters don't, either. Give me that three horsepower!

So of course Singular and I couldn't pass up an opportunity to ride a Segway. And, as you would imagine, it was pretty damn cool. They won't replace scooters, I don't think, but they could realistically replace cars in dense urban environments.

When I hopped on, the thing was whipping back and forth like a spraying tomcat's tail. The Segway balances for you, and so when you try to balance while on it, you overcompensate and it oscillates until you give in to the machine's balance. What I ended up doing is closing my eyes- for what really needs to happen is that you allow the thing to become an extension of your legs, like you have wheels on your feet.

Once I grasped that concept, I was a Segwayin' fool. The slightest pressing down with your toes sends you forward, and the same on your heels sends you back. Stand still to stop. You turn the same way you throttle on a motorcycle. The learning curve was very short- as soon as you relax, you can drive it.

And it was zippy! It was set on the lowest setting- the beginner setting- for minimal sensitivity, coasting stops, and a low maximum speed. Still, it was surprisingly fast. The coach said it could stop on a dime, too, at higher settings. Yet I never felt like I was anywhere near to falling off of it.

It was not a toy. It was a vehicle. I can see kids riding them, but since the wheels are not tandem, you can't carve out corners like you can with a scooter. You just turn like in a car. This thing was overwhelmingly designed as a human transporter, and it did it well, regardless of other applications people are dreaming up for it.

The paper mill where I used to work used "lard carts" to get around, electric mini-golf carts so called because each supervisor got one and got fat after they didn't have to walk anywhere. The compressor factory where my uncle worked used pedal-trikes. I can really see how this would come in handy in an industrial setting. For them, the choice is obvious- if the price is right, why buy a huge cart to tote around a fat supervisor when a vehicle just his size will do the same thing? Lard cart parking took up tons of valuable square footage. For civilians, well, there's other issues.

One is the issue of where it would ride. The company is buying up a lot of political power to get them legalized for the sidewalk. In an urban setting, these things make a ton of sense- think about how much it takes to get someone around the city in a car. With the Segway, there's no issue of traffic, parking, rocketing gas prices, pollution, or planned obsolescence. The only reason people don't walk or ride bikes in the city is because American's are lazy asses- in Europe, plenty of cities have banished cars from their city centers.

But we also LOVE our cars. We love them so much that we drive them to work, and then they're so costly that we work in order to drive them. In the city, a parking space sells for $45k, and rents for $250 a month. Then there's the city sticker ($175), insurance, gas, tickets, and repairs- all for something to get you from here to there. As long as you're not hauling heavy cargo or going long distances, the Segway makes sense every time... provided you're dressed for the weather.

I think America will be reluctant to give up its big honking autos. I think they'll slowly carve out a niche in the city, and then it would take a revolution in urban planning to take the step away from a car-choked downtown. But already GE Plastics and the USPS have bought some Segways for a trial. One of the benefits they list is the fact that you can have human interaction while on it, something that a car prevents.

On the way home, I almost got creamed by a dumbass who blasted through a three-way stop, because he was going the wrong way down a one-way street and therefore didn't have a stop sign. If only he had been on a Segway, I coulda smacked him upside the head.