Smithsonian - 12.2019

16 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019

Illustration by

Kotryna Zukauskaite

By

Clive Thompson

prologue

TECHNOLOGY

When Two

Wheels Are

The Rage

Bicycles revolutionized

personal transport—and led

to surprising societal change.

Will the electric scooter

invasion do the same?

I

T WAS A HOT SUMMER DAY in Hoboken,

New Jersey, and the streets were buzzing

with electric scooters.

Two months earlier, the companies Lime

and Ojo had unleashed 300 of the devices

on the town. You could pay $1 or more to

unlock a scooter with your mobile phone,

then 10 to 29 cents per minute to ride it,

leaving it parked on the sidewalk or docking station when you

were done. By July, you couldn’t go a block without seeing

riders zip by: young women in sundresses, a couple heading

downtown to catch a train, two men in athletic wear, squash

rackets slung over their shoulders. “You gotta hold on tight,”

one rider, a young man coiff ed scruffi ly and wearing sunglass-

es, advised me, “because these things take off when you hit