Snow slows new HT device [Archive]

Casey

10-10-2002, 12:06 PM

quote:Snow slows new HT device
Transporters still not on the market

MICHELLE LALONDE
The Gazette
Thursday, October 10, 2002

The good news for Montrealers is that the Segway Human Transporter - that odd-looking, self-balancing, electric personal transportation device that is supposed to get us out of our cars and speeding along the sidewalks - now has snow tires.

"Michelin has just designed winter tires that can grip ice and snow in a way you wouldn't believe," HT inventor Dean Kamen said in an interview yesterday.

The bad news is the HT, like so many other cleaner transportation technologies, is still not available to consumers.

And though its gyroscopes can take you safely up and down stairs, it can't negotiate more than a couple of inches of snow, so getting over Montreal's drifts would be out of the question.

But Kamen claims his people are working on both of these problems.

Kamen, chairman and CEO of Segway LLC, was in Saint-Jérôme last night to address the opening ceremony of the three-day International Forum on Urban Mobility and Advanced Transportation.

Organizers hope the forum, which brings together about 300 transportation experts from around the world, will give new technologies a much-needed boost.

"We have been talking about less polluting vehicles and advanced methods of transportation for a very long time, yet the evolution is going very slowly," said Pierre Lavallée, executive director of the Centre d'Experimentation des Véhicules Électriques du Québec in Saint-Jérôme.

"We hope that by putting together all these players from industry, research and government, we can accelerate the process of getting cleaner transportation methods into widespread use."

Governments keep promising to support cleaner, quieter, faster and more convenient forms of transportation, Lavallée said, but the consumer still has little choice beyond the internal-combustion engine.

"We have this vicious cycle of manufacturers saying there is no market, consumers saying there is no product, and governments saying there is not enough demand to make laws that encourage the use of cleaner transportation," Lavallée said.

Kamen's much-hyped but still unavailable HT is a case in point. Postal services, police forces and other institutions are test-driving the HT, but it won't be on the consumer market until lawmakers approve its use on sidewalks. So far, Kamen says, 32 U.S. states have complied.

The forum ends Saturday, when the public is invited to see the latest in clean-vehicle technology.

For information, check out the Web site at www.transport-urbain-2002.com.

mlalonde@thegazette.southam.ca

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