For many years, whenever I saw a fully grown adult zinging around a city on one of those stand-up scooters, I’d feel a twinge of contempt. Scooters have always, to me, seemed childish. The purview of 6-year-old kids wearing purple safety helmets. Or perhaps of techie dweebs who kick-glide down the corridors of Silicon Valley corporate campuses—but I confess I tend to imagine those folks possessing the emotional maturity of 6-year-old kids.
Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate . He is the author of Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World
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What makes a grown-up choose to ride a nonstandard personal conveyance? This embrace of the childlike has always seemed to me less about function and more about projecting an air of “zaniness.” (Or of defiant self-conception: “I’m a unicycle guy! Deal with it!”) The average person thinks to herself: Couldn’t that fellow on the scooter just ride a regular bike? Couldn’t that woman on the Segway just, like, walk? Couldn’t that dude on the unicycle take a look in the mirror and ponder the life choices that led to him riding a unicycle?
And yet: As populations flock back into urban areas, and housing costs drive some of us farther from city centers, a transportation challenge has emerged that just might bring certain sorts of unorthodox personal vehicles into play. Probably not the Segway. (Sorry, Segway .) Or the unicycle. (Not sorry, unicycle.) But there’s a niche out there for, say, the foldable electric scooter. And the time has come to cut adult riders of these goofy vehicles some slack.
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Maybe you live a mile and a half from the nearest subway station. Or perhaps you take the light rail to work, but after you hop off the train it’s still a 2-mile walk to your company’s headquarters. Distances like these can require 30 minutes of walking, or more. They add enough time to your commute that you might be tempted to give up on public transport altogether and drive a car or (if you can afford it) spring for an Uber instead.
The particular challenge faced here is called, in transport circles, the last mile problem . How do you cut that half-hour of walking down to an eight-to-10-minute ride using some sort of interim vehicle—a compact conveyance that fills the gap between home or work and the nearest public transportation hub?
Brompton folding bike.
Courtesy Brompton Bicycles
One classic solution is the bicycle. But while bikes can be a lovely part of any multimodal commute—breezy, scenic, elegant—they’re not always a perfect choice. For one thing, bikes are large. It’s possible to schlep a bike down into the subway or strap it to the exterior of a bus, but this process is not, as Uber flacks might say, “frictionless.” Storing your own bike can be impractical if you live in a small apartment, and locking a bike outside overnight risks theft. Some cities offer bikeshares—a commuter may dislodge a bike from a dock conveniently located next to a train stop, and then pedal to another dock closer to her end destination—but many cities don’t, and even those that do don’t put docks everywhere you need them. Folding bicycles mitigate some of these problems, but still: Sometimes you don’t want to cycle (or, by the same token, rollerblade) in your nice work clothes, fearing that you’ll gush rivulets of sweat on your way to a client meeting. Maybe you just don’t fancy an exercise session at the end of a long, wearying day, and thus prefer a much lazier means of propulsion.
Whatever the reason, you might find you pine for something powered by a motor but small enough to carry onto a train. Well, lucky for you, there are some compact, motorized, last-mile transport solutions. I tested out a few to see if they might improve my commute without making me feel like a total doofus.
Boosted Dual
$1,299
Maximum speed: 20 mph
Range on one charge: 6 miles
Time to fully charge: 90 minutes (60 minutes for a 90 percent charge)
Motor power: 1,500 watts
Weight: 15 pounds
Doofus factor: Moderate. Skateboards retain some residual punk cool even after you motorize them.
Boosted Dual.
Courtesy Boosted
The Boosted board seems nigh futuristic in its capabilities. It’s a skateboard with a motor teensy enough to fit beneath the board’s deck yet strong enough to zoom you along at 20 mph on flat ground. Lest you doubt this thing’s torque: It can power a 185-pound person up a 20 percent incline.
You operate the board with a wireless remote control wand, smoothly accelerating or decelerating with a subtle nudge of your thumb. At 38 inches long and weighing 15 pounds, the board is small and light enough to strap onto a sturdy backpack, stow under a desk, or tuck between your knees aboard a subway. Until the hoverboard goes mainstream, this is as close as you’re gonna get.
Still, it’s imperfect. Unless you’re already comfy rolling around town on a regular skateboard, don’t expect to feel comfy climbing aboard one that cruises at the speed of a moped. Sharp turns are out of the question unless you’re Tony Hawk. No matter how much I cantilevered my weight side to side, I could achieve nothing more than a slow, gradual arc. More troublingly, there’s nothing to hold onto when you brake hard, so you simply fly forward off the board and hope to hit the ground running—instead of tumbling. One look at the company’s safety FAQ (e.g., “Remember that your board may lose power and brakes at any moment”) suggests that riding this thing may not be for the faint of heart.
Tellingly, most of the videos on Boosted’s site seem to feature experienced boarders on wide-open roads, in no danger of encountering traffic, free to carve long, graceful turns. In this situation—as I found when I brought the board upstairs to a huge, uninhabited floor in Slate ’s building and put it through its paces—the board is tremendous fun. If your commute is, say, through the empty roads of a little-trafficked office park, you’ll be thrilled. If you’re attempting to carve serpentine turns in Midtown at rush hour, you might get splatted.
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