I’ve had a Segway scooter for the last year and a bit.
It’s been a fun little vehicle.
I gave up my driver’s licence a couple of months ago just right after I got rid of my motorcycle.
I don’t drive, and I can’t see myself ever driving again.
The last car that I owned was back in 1998.
Except for renting a car in Montreal when I visited Montreal in 2014, I’ve never driven.
Motorcycling was fun, but depression was just too strong of an adversary.
I bought the scooter more out of curiosity than anything, I wanted to see how practical it would be. Well, it has been very practical.
At 90% charge it will give me about 80 km of distance on one wheel drive in eco mode. Two wheel drive and sport mode will eat the batter up faster, but still I get good decent travel from it.
It’s not a small scooter, it weighs 45 kg. which with the suspension makes for a very smooth ride.
The wheels are a good size and width.
And the brakes are awesome, especially with the DC injection braking turned on. DC injection is where the scooter motor controller applies a constant DC current to the windings instead of a chopped alternating current. This causes the permanent magnets to repulse off the magnetic fields which causes the wheels to slow down aggressively.
The sad thing though is I am limited as to where I can take the scooter. And I don’t mean by riding restrictions. I mean due to the complete lack of secure parking for non-automobile vehicles.
For example, I used to be able to ride over to International Village and lock my bicycle up in the secured parking lot adjacent to the parking attendant booth.
Once the mall owners put in automated parking they eliminated the secured bicycle racks as there was no one there to monitor them anymore.
Mall management suggested that everyone simply lock up outside. Sad to say that bicycles and scooters don’t stand a change locked up outside in Vancouver.
But, as long as I can keep an eye on my scooter, it’s all okay.
It’s easy to say that I’m paranoid, but portable grinders with cutoff wheels will make quick work of any u-lock on the market.
Another trick up the sleeve of bicycle thieves is they’ll throw a second lock on your bicycle / scooter so that you can’t ride off, but they can come back in the early hours of the morning to take their time.
And even if the thieves don’t steal your ride outright, they’ll grab parts off your ride and render your ride useless.
Bicycle paths are decent in Vancouver, but this is a city that is still well within the grips of 1950’s Eisenhower Car Culture.
Bicycle paths take up less than 0.001 % of the roads in Vancouver, but to hear car drivers whine and cry you’d swear that cars were banned from the city streets.
And no, “gas tax” doesn’t pay for the roads, at least not municipal roads. Municipal roads are paid for and maintained by the citizens living or renting in the city or businesses operating in the city. Everyone, tenant or landlord, pays property taxes to the city the live in and thus everyone living within a particular city pays for the roads and infrastructure in that city.
Another reason why I gave up my driver’s licence, and why I would encourage anyone else who doesn’t drive and who has never used their licence for driving to give up their licence, is that the number of driver’s licences in circulation are used by automobile lobbyists to push government to spend money on car drivers. The more licences, the more drivers, right?
Vancouver, because of its location in the lower mainland, has a massive amount of car drivers that are just passing on through. Yet these drivers expect the roads that they don’t pay for to be maintained as per their expectations.
Things would have been much worse for Vancouver save for the “Stop the Highway” movement from the ’60s that stopped a major freeway from passing through downtown and through various minority neighbourhoods in a plan to eliminate these neighbourhoods. Freeway building back in the ’50s and ’60s was seen as a way to cleanse “urban blight”. Urban blight was a code word for racial and ethnic minorities.
There really isn’t any place that I can’t go on my scooter. I ride over the Lions Gate into North Van and West Van. I go down to Richmond on it. It’s especially nice when going out to FedEx or UPS to pick up parcels as there isn’t any connecting bus service between the Canadian Line and the parcel pick up locations.
I can’t get a straight answer from Amtrak as I would really love to take the scooter down to Portland and Seattle when I go down for visits.
I would have loved to take the scooter to Iceland last year. Sure, Iceland has rental scooters available all over Reykjavik, but they generally have no suspension and have a very rough ride that’s painful on long trips. And yes, Iceland is the ideal place to grab a scooter to head off on the trails outside of the city.
Unfortunately the size of the battery in my scooter means that shipping it by sea in a shipping container is about the only way it’s ever going to get over to Iceland.
$$$$$$$$$$$
The only thing that I get a chuckle about still is from the owner’s manual for my scooter.
Apparently you’re not supposed to ride this scooter if you’re older than 60 or you’re wearing heels.
Beeshive 