Before he actually saw one, Steve Jobs was reported by Time magazine to have said the Segway could be “as big a deal as the PC”. John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Netscape and Amazon, reckoned they could be “bigger than the internet”.
In the 15 or so years that have elapsed since, neither prediction has quite come true (and to be fair, Jobs withdrew his almost as soon as it was made, saying on first sight of the two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter: “I think it sucks.”)
But there is one field where the Segway has now become so popular that it risks getting too big for its own good: the guided city tour.
With groups of tourists trundling invasively and not always competently along crowded city-centre streets from Stockholm to Naples and Kiev to Dublin, the municipal councils of both Prague and Barcelona this month decided enough was enough and slapped partial bans on the gyroscopic scooters.
“We received countless complaints, and decided to satisfy both residents and even some tourists,” said Adriana Krnacova, the mayor of the Czech capital, which was visited by more than 6.6 million holidaymakers last year.
Announcing a complete ban on the battery-powered machines from the historic city centre starting in August, the council said Segways – permitted until now on both roads and pavements in Prague – had become so numerous that a serious accident was only a matter of time.
A Segway tour operator, Jaroslav Endrst, has protested in vain that the industry was being “bullied”, that most tour companies obeyed the law, and that any issues were down to the police’s “inability or unwillingness to enforce it”. Three hundred jobs were at stake, he said.
But in Barcelona, the city’s mobility councillor, Mercedes Vidal, said the Catalan capital – which welcomes 27 million tourists a year on top of a resident population density three times greater than London’s – was facing similar problems.
“Barcelona has too much pressure on its public spaces,” Vidal said, “and technology has advanced more quickly than regulations.”
Faced with seven different companies offering Segway tours, the city has introduced a provisional summer ban on the machines from its most congested area, the waterfront.
According to SegwayGuidedTours, an online directory – as the name suggests – of Segway guided tours, 427 cities and other venues in 56 countries around the world now offer a total of 622 Segway tours.
More than half are in the US, where the Segway was first unveiled by its inventor, Dean Kamen, in 2001, with Florida and California alone offering more than 50 excursions each. In Europe, enthusiasts have have 44 options in Spain and 18 each in France and Britain.
“It’s a great way to see a city,” said Massimo Ferrara, a guide with one of the dozen agencies offering Segway tours – typically lasting two to three hours – in Rome. “It’s fun to ride a Segway anyway, and you see way more than you would on foot. If you get tired of walking or bored with sights, it’s perfect.”
Cities and countries differ in their regulatory approach to the Segway, whose greatest claims to fame thus far have tended to be accidents involving well-known people: when a Segway-riding TV cameraman knocked Usain Bolt off his feet in 2015, for example; when George W Bush fell off one in 2003; or – more tragically – when Jimi Heselden, the Yorkshire businessman who had only recently bought the company, reversed his over a cliff and and died in 2010.
In some countries, including France, they are treated like pedestrians, so allowed on the pavement. In others, the law views them as both pedestrians and bicycles, permitting them – in Italy, for example – to use bike paths and public streets as well. Germany allows them on the road in built-up areas, but requires a permit for pavement use.
Visitors looking for a Segway tour in London or any other British city, however, will be disappointed (although tours of woods and parkland are readily available in several places around the country).
That’s because it is the view of the Department for Transport that Segways are motor vehicles, and therefore not allowed on pavements under the 1835 Highways Act, which says people cannot use the footway to “lead or drive any horse, ass, sheep, mule, swine, or cattle or carriage of any description”.
Unfortunately, since using a motor vehicle on the road requires the user to be licensed and insured, and the vehicle to be road-legal as regards lights, brakes and registration plates, Segways are not permitted on UK highways either, in effect making them off-road vehicles.
In 2011, a Barnsley man, Philip Coates, was fined £75 for riding his Segway on the pavement – despite the support of the former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, who arrived at court on a Segway in solidarity. The prospect of posses of Segway-mounted tourists wobbling down the Mall or across Tower Bridge is, for the time being at least, some way off.
