[Madison]

The evolution of the design of cities is a fun subject to study. Urban planners have, for centuries, sought to develop city plans that are at the same time efficient and entertaining, beautiful and bustling, clean and convenient. each feature different iterations of city designs and each has had unique problems in In these evolutions, a number of different strategies have been used to achieve those goals and all have been met only with mixed successes. London, Barcelona, and New York represent different iterations in the history of city design.

No change has had a greater impact upon cities in the last century than the advent of the automobile and the middle class exodus to the suburbs. The independence offered by the car coupled with the still increasing recreational time available to the middle class decimated American narratives of previous decades that told of cohesive neighborhoods that could fulfill our every need. There was, however, one obstacle to suburban expansion and the automobile – roads.

Lack of infrastructure was truly the problem, insofar as there were roads in existence by the time of the middle class flight, but they couldn’t effectively handle the large increase of traffic that comes with commuting from the suburbs to jobs in the city. A dirt road that winds through the farm towns of Long Island was simply not enough to handle the flood of cars headed for the sandy beaches every weekend. Someone had to step in.

Enter Robert Moses. Moses was head of the Long Island State Parks Commission and responsible for, among other things, the New York World’s Fairs. A key part in bringing the Fairs to New York was improving the city’s infrastructure so that it could handle the crowds anticipated to attend; and I say anticipated only because the ’64 Fair was largely unsuccessful.

These events – providing access to Long Island parks and the World’s Fair – paved the way, forgive the phrase, for the birth of suburbia. It assured the dominance of the automobile in the American way of life.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (co-authored by Al Gore, Sr., father of Vice President Al Gore) funded the construction of our interstate highway systems, providing mainline, high speed access into and between major cities for automobiles – facilitating easier travel between these destinations and changing the ways we distribute freight and goods. It also put the last nail in the coffin of passenger rail travel in the United States and was the initiating factor in the demise of all but three freight-hauling railroads.

Tired of the history lesson? Well, I think it’s important that we have a reasonable understanding of what’s happened to get us to today so that we can best decide how to get where we’d like to be tomorrow.

Circa 1966, ten years after the Federal-Aid Highway Act, serious discussion about implementing an experimental city plan again began in earnest. Walt Disney’s EPCOT was conceived as a utopian community design that eliminated the need for automobiles for everyday use by ensuring that access to jobs, services and entertainment was convenient and reliable to everyone residing within the planned community. Of course, we’re all aware that Walt Disney’s vision died on December 15, 1966 with him. His company then envisioned Epcot as a permanent World’s Fair and another great experiment in urban planning was forever abandoned.

The Segway is, in my opinion, the opening shot in the next salvo of efforts to redesign our cities – to again attempt to correct the errors of the past. Where Robert Moses sought to build roadways upon roadways to keep up with the demand to use the automobile, modern planners seek to eliminate that demand altogether. Pollution and the upkeep of our environment is now a widespread, valid concern among those charged with establishing positive precedent for our future to draw upon. Therein, however, also lays the largest challenge to the Segway and its successors.

The people who do the most damage to the environment in the residential context are the people who seem most apt to criticize the Segway and the potential redesign of cities to accommodate it. People are unwilling to give up the perception of freedom that their automobiles offer in trade for a cleaner environment and that decision is crippling the planet and the potential devices, such as the Segway, have for effecting change. Better the devil you know than the devil you do not.

As use of the Segway increases – both due to greater availability and further market saturation through time – demand for its accommodation in cities will rise. It took nearly fifty years before our culture was sufficiently saturated by automobiles such that cities became acclimatized to their presence. The Segway HT has been available only moments by comparison, having debuted in late 2001. It is far too early to accurately predict what impact it may have in future years.

Furthermore, cars are not only problematic as pollutants, but also in that they occupy considerable space for the function they serve. The volume of an automobile is only useful as long as its carrying passengers or cargo. Seeking to minimize or eliminate such unused volume is attractive in urban planning because it benefits efforts to create more open spaces in urban areas with high population and infrastructure density. It is for this reason that we now encounter city improvements designed to remove these things from sight – underground utilities and even things such as Boston’s Big Dig being obvious examples.

The Segway is a solution to many of these problems, but it’s not perfect. It is without emissions and relatively compact and lightweight. It requires less space to operate because of both its size and its zero turning radius, and though its capacity is currently limited to one person, the overall volume of four Segways is still smaller than that of a compact car. It is still best suited for short trips in urban environments. It represents, at this point, only one link in the chain that can make transportation more efficient and environmentally friendly.

All of that having been said, it is clear that the Segway is nothing if not an environmentally friendly invention. It will not replace the automobile so much as it will render it obsolete. In the future, as cities change to accommodate a growing population of Segway and mass transit users, you will be unable to drive your car – whether it be a Hummer or a hybrid – into the heart of a city. Our avenues will be replaced by greenways; our highways by rail lines. Cities will change, just as they have time and time again. It is impossible to guess if those changes will result, finally, in the perfect utopia or if another series of problems will appear, with solutions to those problems causing yet another shift in how we view our interactions with the environment and with one another.