Am I just a Negative Nancy?

My boss just bought a Seg­way. One of my co-work­ers’ boyfriend is a Seg­way sales­man, and we’re talk­ing about hav­ing guid­ed Seg­way-based tours of the Fish­er­man’s Wharf area. I’m hear­ing a lot about Seg­ways late­ly, and this morn­ing they con­vinced me to come out and ride one.

Here in San Fran­cis­co, the Board of Super­vi­sors passed an ordi­nance ban­ning Seg­ways on the side­walks. But appar­ent­ly every new Seg­way comes with a card describ­ing the loop­holes in the law, so that if pulled over by a cop you can point to the card and declare that your elec­tric vehi­cle is greater than one-horse­pow­er and not sub­ject to the ordinance.

This makes me a lit­tle sick. First, these aren’t peo­ple that care about rights and the law unless it affects their abil­i­ty to sell scoot­ers. But yes, just because they have a finan­cial inter­est does­n’t make them wrong.

So I’m think­ing about this and imag­in­ing walk­ing down the side­walk (which I do every day) and hav­ing some 15-year old zip past me on a skate­board (which hap­pens not infre­quent­ly). That’s unnerv­ing and trou­bling. Now the same sce­nario, with some rich 35-year old guy on a $5000 scoot­er knock­ing peo­ple over on his way to get his lat­te? My first blush reac­tion is that I’d chase him down and kick the liv­ing shit out of him.

So here I am being all neg­a­tive about these things. Is this just resis­tance to change? The Seg­way man­u­fac­tur­ers claim that this is the next step in human evo­lu­tion, and I’m just a naysay­er turn­ing up his nose at progress.

Yeah, it would be cool if Mar­ket Street were full of these things instead of cars. But I don’t think they belong on sidewalks.