Scooters for Technophiles
January 23, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
FRANK TROPEA stands on the Brooklyn Bridge, taking in the
breathtaking view of Manhattan on a bitterly cold Saturday
afternoon.
Actually, he is standing about eight inches above the
bridge, atop his Segway Human Transporter, the high-tech
celebrity scooter.
He has stopped because a young woman and her husband saw
him riding along the bridge and ran after him, flagging him
down. "Hey, a Segway!" shouts Jon Levitsky, pronouncing the
name as if its first syllable rhymed with "hedge.'' (It is
pronounced SEG-way, like "segue.")
[Of course anyone who reads the New York Times uses words like "segue" all of the time ...
Excuse me, but what the **** is a "segue" ? (And, how is it pronounced ? ]
Mr. Levitsky and his
wife, Sharon Herbstman, catch up to chat. The conversation
goes the way hundreds of conversations have already gone
for Mr. Tropea, the owner of the first Segway in New York
City.
Women, in general, ask whether it is difficult to ride.
(No.)
Men, in general, ask three questions:
How much does it cost? How fast does it go? What kind of
mileage do you get with that?
(About $5,000, 12.5 miles per hour, about 11 miles per
electrical charge.)
The 12.5 miles per hour is, apparently, theoretical. Mr.
Tropea can rarely reach that speed; too many people stop
him to gawk and talk.
In a world where toys still matter, he has the most awesome
secret decoder ring of the moment, the shiniest Schwinn.
The two-wheeled Segway's simple looks have been compared to
an old-fashioned reel lawn mower's, but its seeming
simplicity is deceptive.
Using sensors, solid-state gyroscopes and home-brewed
software, the Segway's inventor, Dean Kamen, has made a
remarkably stable machine that keeps the rider balanced and
even compensates for the hazards of rough terrain, gravel
and sand. But the technology is hidden with the stylish
understatement of the Tivoli Audio radio, which places
sophisticated frequency-grabbing circuitry behind only two
knobs and an old-fashioned case.
It will not be available to the general public until March,
but advance sales have already made it one of the 200
best-selling items on Amazon despite its $4,950 price tag.
But something there is that doesn't love a Segway. Some
groups speaking on behalf of pedestrians say that the
vehicles will crowd the sidewalks, increasing the risk of
injury. One such group, America Walks
(www.americawalks.org), has fought legislation that would
legalize the Segway on sidewalks, and says on its Web site,
"Nothing that moves faster than walking speed belongs in
the space intended for walking."
Thanks to a vigorous lobbying campaign by Mr. Kamen's
company, 33 states have passed laws explicitly allowing the
Segway to roam their streets and sidewalks. Many of those
states allow cities, however, to ban the machines, and
several are considering it. San Francisco is the first
major city to have done so; Santa Cruz, Calif., after
mulling a ban, decided to wait and see.
On the Brooklyn Bridge, Rick Heffernan, a 38-year-old
epidemiologist walking along with a Starbucks cup in his
hand, asks Mr. Tropea about the risks and whether the
safety mechanisms built into the device could be defeated.
"Everything is dangerous, if you're stupid," he replies.
Mr. Tropea got his Segway early, on Dec. 24, by winning a
contest in which he had to say, in 75 words or less, why he
liked the Segway. He wrote that he liked the idea of
eliminating the expensive taxi trips that "contribute to
air and noise pollution, as well as traffic congestion."
The "practical and elegant" invention, he said, "moves you
forward towards a cleaner and quieter city."
He had been a fan from the beginning, when Inside.com, a
media-oriented Web site, broke the story in January 2001
about a mysterious new invention by Mr. Kamen, who had
achieved fame and fortune through creations that include an
innovative arterial stent and a wheelchair that climbs
stairs. A frenzy of speculation and hype ensued over IT,
the code name for the machine at the time. Meanwhile, Mr.
Tropea, who works in Manhattan as an administrator for the
city's courts, created his own Web site, SegwayChat.com, to
discuss the invention and help other fans keep up with the
news.
Winning the contest (there were 31 other winners) did not
get him a discount, but it did get him a trip to New
Hampshire to tour the Segway plant, to take a brief
training course and to have dinner with the other winners
at Mr. Kamen's home. Mr. Tropea, 27, speaks of the
experience the way a teenager might talk about meeting a
rock star.
One might expect the wife of anyone who brings home a
$5,000 scooter, no matter how cool, to call the family
psychiatrist. But Mr. Tropea's wife, Azeeza, is happy with
the purchase.
"I can't ride a bicycle," she says, but "it took me about a
minute to learn to ride the Segway." She believes they
will, over time, save money on car service fares. "Too bad
we cannot have two so we can ride together." She calls it
"the magic ride."
Mr. Tropea has no financial deal with the company to
promote the machine, but no force on earth can keep him
from doing so, either. He is besotted. "It's called a
Segway Human Transporter. Five thousand bucks. Yeah,
electric, just 10 cents a charge. You want to try it?" He
lets people stand on the device, get the feel of the
machine's calculated balance and spookily intuitive
responsiveness.
The rider tells a Segway to go by leaning forward, and to
slow down or go backward by leaning back. Twisting a small
ring on the left handlebar tells the device to turn.
"It's awesome, man!" shouts Kalin Ivanov, who broke off
from videotaping a panoramic sweep of the city to capture
Mr. Tropea in action.
Mr. Tropea said some people argue that he has bought an
overpriced "geek magnet." But it is rather a people magnet,
especially for the opposite sex, he said. "If I wasn't
married, this is what I would need to meet girls," he said.
It is no exaggeration. A young woman catches his eye and
asks about his ride. "Can you go fast?" she asks, and
raises an eyebrow playfully. "Do you think you could catch
me?"
Segway fans like Mr. Tropea envision fleets of the machines
in a range of models replacing current forms of
transportation for police officers on the beat, letter
carriers and hundreds of other workers who need to scoot
around but do not need a car or truck for the job.
Commenting, "We live in an obese society," one man on the
Brooklyn Bridge, Jack Smith, asks why a machine that allows
people to exercise even less is a good thing. Mr. Tropea
answers, "I don't replace any walking with the Segway." He
uses it only for trips that are not within easy walking
distance, like his weekly visit to his parents' home in the
Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn, a few miles away from
his place in Bay Ridge. He figures that he is saving more
than $100 each month in car service bills.
He even takes the machine on the subway, using mass transit
to extend its reach. (Going up and down stairs is less
trouble than might be expected. He dismounts and lowers the
85-pound Segway gently in front of him on the stairs,
bouncing it down one step at a time. Going up, he is able
to turn on the "power assist" feature so that the wheels
turn and help him pull it.)
Mr. Smith walks away satisfied. But like the members of
America Walks, he has picked up on an undercurrent of
resentment. Some of that is almost certainly related to the
backlash sentiment against Hummers, Escalades and other
holdover symbols of boom-time excess that would cast the
Segway as the sport-utility vehicle of the sidewalk.
"It's got this redolence of New Economy foolishness," said
Thomas Frank, a social critic and the author of "One Market
Under God" (Anchor Books, 2001), which skewered the dot-com
heydays. Even the Segway's playfulness, its appeal to the
inner child, he finds galling. "It's as though being a
responsible adult is a burden of the working class," he
says, while the more fortunate "get to posture as special,
exalted beings of wonder and innocence."
If that pothole lies ahead, Mr. Tropea seems unconcerned.
As he hits the sidewalks of Lower Manhattan, he weaves
effortlessly through the throngs along Canal Street. He
glides around people who pull loaded carts that are more
than twice the width of Mr. Tropea and his machine, and he
avoids the tables set up by outdoor hawkers. He takes up
less space than, say, a beefy football lineman, but he does
attract attention. He is going gently.
Mr. Tropea was chosen to be a pioneer because he is all the
right things: patient, considerate, passionate. He will
demonstrate it for anyone who asks, answering the same
questions endlessly. His 75-word essay, after all, did not
say, "I like the Segway because it would help me to
terrorize people on the sidewalks and run over adorable
puppies." He is SegwayMan, who has pledged to use his
powers of effortless transport and celebrity for good
instead of evil.
Come March, a different breed of Segway owner may begin to
appear, the kind of people like the young man who skated by
Mr. Tropea at breakneck speed and looked back, smirking.
The idea of people like him trading in skates for a Segway
would do far more than America Walks might to sour people
on the scooter.
Still, many of the would-be skeptics might not be able to
bring themselves to hate the Segway. Fiona Bayly, a
marathon runner who lives in New York, says she is inclined
to dislike it because the city "depends on its pedestrians
to give it its vitality." Removing people's shoes from the
sidewalk encroaches "on an aspect of city life that it
shouldn't encroach on," she says. "It just seems so
foreign."
Then Ms. Bayly wavers. "It's good that they don't pollute,"
she says. "If we could decrease car use and increase Segway
use, that would be fantastic."
And stops again.
"They look like fun, to tell you the truth."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company. |
