Segway

[artdutra04]

You need to live somewhere with sidewalks for it to be a viable mode of transportation (It may sound funny, but I've been to some parts of this country where I've been shocked at the lack of sidewalks/crosswalks). Most older neighborhoods (pre-WWII/pre-automobile) have extensive sidewalks everywhere, as well as some new neighborhoods. Here in the northeast, while there was a period (in the 1950s through about the 1970s) where sidewalks fell out of favor, zoning rules now mandate sidewalk construction on all new property being built/renovated around here. With an abundance of sidewalks combined with level-boarding public transit (think high-level train/bus platforms), it's a really versatile mode of transportation if it isn't raining or snowing.

Unfortunately, due to zoning-mandated low-density [inefficient] sprawl, most of the country is too sprawled out for efficient pedestrian/transit based transportation systems to work right now, except in some urban centers and many "older" cities in the upper Midwest/Northeast. This was the major reason why Segways didn't take off like many originally thought, in that for the last sixty years we've been building our cities to zoning laws heavily lobbied for and influenced by the automobile industry to strictly limit density (thus ensuring that there would never be any efficient alternative to the automobile, thus instant monopoly).

That's not to say we shouldn't work towards improving the pedestrian/cyclist and public transit systems in our cities, but that's the current state of affairs.