prologue
18 SMITHSONIAN.COM | December 2019TECHNOLOGYLast year
Americans took
more than 38
million electric
scooter trips in
100 cities. Many
scooters, like
the Lime-S, can
travel as far as
20 miles on a
single charge.GETTY^ IMAGES^the throttle. Sixteen miles an hour!
It’ll throw you!”
E-scooters are part of a wave of “mi-
cromobility” companies that have ar-
rived, seemingly overnight , in U.S. cit-
ies, plopping down thousands of elec-
tric bikes and scooters. Fans swear
by them, arguing that the scooters
let them take fewer car rides, saving
money and reducing carbon dioxide
emissions, while opening up parts of
the city they might otherwise never
go to. Plus, “they’re just so much fun,”
one Hoboken woman gushed.
“Micromobility is solving the last-
mile problem ,” of traveling short dis-
tances when public transit and cabs
aren’t convenient, says Euwyn Poon,
president and co-founder of Spin, a
division of Ford that off ers dockless electric scooters.
But the kudzu-like growth of scooters has also
tangled urban life. City offi cials complain the fi rms
don’t manage the behavior of riders, who are gener-
ally not supposed to ride on sidewalks but frequent-
ly do, enraging pedestrians (and sometimes plowing
into them). Riders are also supposed to park scooters
neatly upright, but when some are inevitably strewn
about on sidewalks, they become an obstacle. And
on America’s badly maintained roads, fast-moving
scooters aren’t terribly stable, and the companies
don’t provide helmets with each ride. Hitting a bump
or pothole can send riders fl ying, knocking out teeth
or even causing traumatic head injuries.
Furious citizens are now vandalizing the devic-
es nationwide: Behold the Instagram feed “Bird
Graveyard,” devoted to images of Bird scooters and
their kin poking mournfully out of riverbeds, where
they’ve been hurled, or buried handlebar-deep in
sand. “Those things are a straight-up public menace,”
fumed one Hoboken resident on Twitter. Some city
politicians are trying to ban the scooters altogether.
It’s a messy rollout, pun intended. The last time we
saw an intense debate like this over a curious new form
of personal transportation that suddenly descended
on cities and angered pedestrians was a century ago,
and the “micromobility” in question was the bicycle.IT TOOK INVENTORS about 70 years to perfect the
bicycle. An ur-version was built in the 1810s by the
German inventor Karl von Drais , and it was just two
wheels on a frame. You scooted along by pushing it,
Flintstones-style, with your feet. “On a plain, evenafter a heavy rain, it will go 6 to 7 miles an hour,
which is as swift as a courier,” Drais boasted.
By the 1870s, entrepreneurs were putting pedals
on the front wheel, creating the “velocipede” (the
Latin roots for “fast foot”). Since a bigger wheel went
faster, inventors built front wheels as huge as fi ve
feet tall , stabilized by a tiny back wheel—a “penny
farthing,” as the cycle was known. Riding was mostly
a sport of well-off young men, and riders exulted at
the dual feelings of speed and height. “From the sad-
dle we perceive things which are hidden from them
who only walk upon the earth,” one Connecticut rid-
er boasted in 1882. “We dash across the plain with a
wild sense of freedom and power which no one ever
knows until he rides the magic steed.”
From the very beginning, though, riders were also
mocked as fops pursuing a ludicrous pastime. Pe-
destrians back then were the prime users of roads
and sidewalks, so cycles seemed like dangerous in-
terlopers. A Baltimore newspaper called the bicycle
“a curious two-wheeled device... which is propelled
by jackasses instead of horses.” One New Haven, Con-
necticut, newspaper editorial even encouraged people
to “seize, break, destroy, or convert to their own use as
good prize, all such machines found running on the
sidewalks.” As long ago as 1819, a New York man wrote
a letter to a newspaper complaining that you “cannot
enjoy a walk in the evening, without the danger of be-
ing run over by some of these new-created animals.”
In truth, the bikes were arguably more dangerous
to the riders themselves. Hit a bump and you might
fi nd yourself “taking a header”—a coinage of the
time—by fl ying over the high front wheel. “Plenty