Hover boots would be brilliant. We seemed to be promised them sometime in the 1970s, and I’m still strumming my fingers in anticipation. In the meantime, there’s always this.
My feet are a few inches off the ground, but motionless. I glide along effortlessly, at speeds of up to 15mph, accompanied only by a faint humming noise. All around me unenlightened people are still walking, for Pete’s sake. There’s no licence requirement, no insurance and no VED. This is electric scootering.
The electric scooter is one of the things — along with the iPad, streaming TV and Internet porn — that I’d like to gather up from my adult life and take with me back to my teenage years. I’d show it to Sir Clive Sinclair, to reassure him that his vision of simple electric urban mobility was spot on, and that he’d just got the vehicle wrong.
As it is, I bought one in my fifties, a year and a half ago, and yes, I’ve been breaking the law. Mine’s the Xiaomi Mi Pro 2, sold to me by Halfords on the strict understanding that it was for use only on privately owned land, but I don’t have any of that and riding it up and down the kitchen really annoys my missus. So I’ve been using it on the road, in bicycle lanes and on the pavement. I’ll come quietly.
But you would, wouldn’t you? Because it’s little more than an adjunct to walking, and very much, as has often been said of small urban buses, hop on, hop off. It feels like beating the system and it is, because it’s a powered vehicle and therefore should be registered.
But trying to police the use of electric scooters has been recognised as a futile endeavour: you may as well legislate against people trying to say words when burping. So the government is relenting. It started with trials of rental scooters — something that has been very successful on what we can now go back to calling The Continent — and it looks as though we’ll soon be able to own them privately, personal disused Olympic village or not, and that’s as it should be. Policing and lawmaking are ultimately by public consent, and we can’t be arsed to walk.
But back to the scoot. It has three riding modes — pedestrian, standard, sport — and a real-world range of around 20 miles. Top speed is 15.5mph (that’s 25kmh) and there are built-in lights, a neat side stand for parking, the inevitable accompanying app, blah, blah, blah.
iewed simply as “a thing”, the electric scooter is marvellous. There is a lovely glowing display, a simple thumb trigger to make it go and it recharges from a regular plug in a few hours (eight hours for a full charge, but nobody ever does that). It’s effectively free to use and requires no input of effort, and I don’t think this has ever been true before.
Off we go then: a few scoots with my left foot to start it rolling (this is a safety feature — it won’t go otherwise), then I squeeze the trigger and the world is all mine. Most importantly, I’m not having constantly to lift each foot and place it in front of the other in the accepted manner of what we call “walking”; an incredibly old-fashioned and ridiculous idea.
But at this point I become slightly baffled. It’s fun, yes. Cool in a nerdy sort of way, and delightfully childish. It’s a scooter. But what’s it actually for?
For patrolling a warehouse or the deck of a supertanker, or for simply getting around one of those vast underground particle physics laboratories, it would be ideal. I refer you to my idea to turn the London Underground and other subways into bicycle superhighways. Electric scooters would be wonderful in there. But down on the street with Iggy Pop I have several doubts.
Post time: Dec-10-2022