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Mall Flop

My latest Slate column considers the Segway.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Mall Flop”

  1. Joe Gotchy Says:
    July 8th, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    I enjoyed reading your latest piece in Slate on the Segway. While I also enjoyed reading the various comments that people have left, I would like to add another viewpoint. My father is 82 years old. After serving this country as Marine during World War II (in the Pacific…island hopping and in China), he spent his working life in heavy construction building bridges and piers. The work tore his body apart. He has two spinal fusions and two artifical hips. During most of his sixties and seventies he wasn’t able to walk vrey well or very far. He could not go to the local shopping mall or grocery store with my mother. Walking, even short distances, was too painful. Toward the middle of his seventies he acquired one of those little motorized scooters. It got him around….but he was always looking at people’s waist lines rather than their faces. About three years ago he went out on his own and researched and then purchased his own Segway. Just like the internet had done for him ten years earlier, the Segway became more than a transportation devise. It liberated him. It is light enough that he can put it in the back of his PT cruiser and he can take it anywhere….to the mall, grocery shopping, to the park, or to buy a gift for my mother if he wants to. He has taken it countless times to the Narrows Bridge and has traveled from end to end of the bridge….which he could never do on foot. What’s more, he can have a conversation with people eye to eye. It has allowed him to regain some of his dignity, pride, and mobility. As a gereatric transporter I would give the Segway an A+. Thanks again for your article.
    Joe

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

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