No room on sidewalks for the facts [Archive]

Casey

11-19-2002, 05:36 PM

quote:No room on sidewalks for the facts
People mover could kill, supervisor says

KEN GARCIA Tuesday, November 19, 2002

He's faster than a speeding scooter, more powerful than at least eight other little-known candidates, and able to threaten police officers with their jobs in a single shout.

He's SUPER-visor Chris Daly, protector of truth, justice, homeless lobbyists and, occasionally, the American way.

Daly's got a new cause, and that means trouble for anyone who stands between him and his notion, especially a gadget inventor who was just trying to create a way for people to move around in a relatively easy, efficient and environmentally sensitive way. Daly's determined to make San Francisco's sidewalks safe -- not necessarily cleaner -- but certainly free of any alleged granny-crushing innovations.

And so it is that the man of the people has taken on the people mover, the contraption that looks like a lawn mower with handlebars, can stop on a dime, turn on a nickel and has been approved for future use in California and 32 other states.

Daly wants to ban the Segway Human Transporter from city sidewalks because he insists, at the behest of some very special special-interest groups, that it's potentially life-threatening for pedestrians, street sleepers, pets and their unsuspecting guardians.

"Stop the Segway Slaughter," read one of the placards held by a small group of protesters outside City Hall the other day. Segways are the "SUV's of the sidewalks" chimed in the ever reasonable Supervisor Jake McGoldrick.

There's only one problem with this apocalyptic scenario batted around the supervisors chambers last week before a committee of the board voted to recommend a ban on the scooters: The dreaded Segways are nowhere to be found. They only became commercially available to the public Sunday, and the company won't deliver but a handful of the Segways until March 2003. And while the portrait of hundreds of maniacs riding sidewalk killing machines was much in evidence among Daly and his cohorts Thursday, their hyperbole is not based on a shred of evidence.

Now I realize that having all the facts before making decisions is not a concept held dear by the majority of our current supervisors, but in my profession it remains a somewhat popular pastime. And while the Segway's march toward a mass market may be a corporate dream, the thought of hordes of people riding $5,000 scooters to get across town holds about as much merit as parents skateboarding their kids to school.

A woman from the Department of Parking and Transportation, which is supposed to be the authority on such things, told the supervisors on the committee that the agency wanted to do a study before any Segway ban was put into place. That way the city could see if the battery-charged scooters really were a nuisance or a danger. That would give supervisors actual data on which to base a decision.

"We would want to test them ourselves to see if they could be useful," said DPT spokeswoman Diana Hammons. "If a ban were put into place we couldn't do the study."

But why put reason on board when you can have a ban before a study? Despite a finding that only one accident on a Segway has been recorded among scores of civic agencies and some private businesses that have logged tens of thousands of hours testing them in the past year, Daly and his champions at the Senior Action Network, the group pushing the proposed city ban, characterized the machines as futuristic death rays. They predicted they'd be a terror to the public, flinging pedestrians aside like throwaway newspapers.

Daly, no stranger to rhetoric, insisted that without his life-saving legislation for seniors, America's sidewalks will become the motorized freeways of tomorrow. He said that legislators in Sacramento did the wrong thing in approving use of the transport machines in California, though the state law left plenty of room for local jurisdictions to place their own legal restrictions on the Segway's use.

Other cities are trying to determine if the Segway can help police, emergency medical technicians, traffic control officers and postal workers do their jobs. San Francisco wants to prove it is like no other city.

Although much testimony was presented by members of the vociferous Senior Action Network, several disabled people spoke of the marvels of the Segway, which they said after testing -- courtesy of Segway representatives -- opened up avenues to them previously unavailable.

"To me this is the best thing I've ever come across," said Jim Faulkner, a disabled senior who can walk only one or two blocks and is forced to take his car on almost every errand. "It's the greatest thing I've seen for people in pain who need mobility."

If the ban is approved later this month, those supervisors who voted for it might have to explain why they're singling out a nonemission machine that fits in well with the city's transit-first policy.

It may very well be that Segway scooters should be limited to streets and bike lanes. Or that there may be uncluttered sidewalks in residential areas where postal workers and employees of other civic agencies could effectively use the transport gadgets. Or that it might be helpful to allow disabled people to have access to the machines to help them get around the steep streets of San Francisco. A little research might help.

But Daly's plan doesn't allow for that or for any future study because Daly knows he's right. It's a burden of the mighty who have to make decisions for the little people.

It's kind of like Oz, without the flying broomsticks