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