Segway

Weaning human beings off their addiction to the wheel may be impossible. One case in point is the current Segway controversy in Boston's North End. The controversy entails public safety vs. exploitative tourism on one level. On a basic level, it is a battle for pedestrian rights over vehicular rights in the public space.

Old Boston is a city of ancient pedestrian lanes, turned into narrow streets with narrower sidewalks. As the 17th-century English settlers populated the landscape, their lives were centered on the shore line, their connection to their motherland. They jammed their houses as close to the waterfront as they could without much care for traffic patterns. It was a pedestrian settlement with little livestock and fewer wheeled vehicles.

Nearly four centuries later, people are still living and touring on the same streets. A local entrepreneur has decided that the best way for out-of-shape, car-addicted tourists to see Boston is on a Segway for a price. And, the out-of-shape and/or wheel-addicted tourists are eating it up. After all, it's much closer to reality than buzzing by on one of the scores of annoying, diesel-belching Duck Boats that plague the city. They can't navigate the North End's smaller lanes anyway.

Segways have now spilled out of the realm of quirky tourism and into the streets. Helmeted, yuppy couples are seen haughtily buzzing along the Esplanade on warm Sundays with little care for the crowded pedestrians, already harassed by skateboarders, bicyclists and roller bladders. Segways occasionally buzz along city sidewalks in the West End, where I have been squeezed to the curb by one on its urgent path to ever-green, techie Cambridge.

Ah, what a lovely thought: Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of battery-powered Segways turning the sidewalks of Boston into mini-expressways. So much for tackling the problem of obesity in the population. Perhaps the fantasy future, portrayed in the film Wall-E, is closer than we think.

What happened to the pride in Boston as America's most walkable city? The answer is simple: Greed, coupled with disregard for the public good, happened. The culture of "the newest thing" has replaced the culture of refining what is best in what you have. As Boston's native population has been squeezed out by high real estate prices, the traditional pride in its neighborhoods and its pedestrian accessibility by its citizens has also been exploited by tourist businesses. It is becoming a Disney confabulation of its former self, like Manhattan and other American places.

Segway may well be a segue to an impersonal theme park where a charming, walkable city once stood against the onslaught of crass commercial gimickry.