Segways in the morning, segways in the evening, segways at supper time

Note: a very edited version of this long letter was published in the Circuits Section of The New York Times in February, 2003. It was the lead letter.

To the Editor:

In America, our land of wretched excess, with its

monster houses and monster SUVs, what do the fattest

people on earth need most of all? Why, a personal

electric scooter that will eliminate the need to walk.

Brilliant. Enter the $5,000 segway, soon to be

barreling down your sidewalk. One segway may be a cute

curiosity for techno-lovers, but a dozen of them on a

city block will constitute an unpleasant menace for

pedestrians. Your recent article, "On the Pavement, A

New Contender," (The Times, January 23) was

depressing. Walking is probably the best form of

moderate exercise available. It's free, easy,

healthful and can be done almost anytime and anywhere.

Now we have another infernal contraption for the

wealthy to avoid walking and to threaten and bully the

rest of us. This is progress?

According to the laws of motion of classical physics,

the kinetic energy (K. E.) of a moving body is

proportional to its mass (m) times the square of the

velocity (v): K.E. = 1/2mv2. Weighing in at about

sixty-five pounds plus the weight of the rider, a

segway traveling at ten mph will pack at least ten

times the kinetic energy of a walking pedestrian. In

collisions between segways and pedestrians, the

pedestrians will always be the losers.

The segway will be great for sidewalk showoffs and

wealthy bullies with an extra five thousand dollars in

their pockets. But for the rest of us, this vehicle

will soon become to be known variously as a

"People-mower," "Bully-mobile," "Pedestrian-mower" or

"Sidewalk-SUV." Imagine a young jerk on his segway,

with cell-phone in one hand, weaving and bobbing down

the sidewalk at a high rate of speed. The next step

will be segway bullies actually aiming at pedestrians

and playing segway-chicken with other segway drivers.

After a few serious injuries and high-award lawsuits,

this vehicle will be banned from city sidewalks and

will be relegated to post office and corporate parking

lots and sooner or later, the dustbin of technological

history. This personal mobility device has many

negative features: it is almost completely unneeded,

it is very expensive and it has great potential for

bullying pedestrians. It's too bad that our

much-vaunted "genius of market capitalism" can't come

up with socially functional transportation instead of

this anti-social personal-assault vehicle (PAV).

Segways should be banned from being driven on city

sideways. They should be relegated to bicycle lanes in

the street, since they travel at speeds that

approximate that of bicycles in city traffic.

The article's best line was, "But something there is

that doesn't love a Segway." Hmm, I guess that I have

been relegated to the category of "something."

Yours truly,

James K. Sayre

25 January 2003