Technology – Page 21 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

E-scooters will be personally owned – not hired or shared

At present, The Plague and The Riots loom large. But when historians look back on 2020, will they instead talk about e-scooters? I am now betting so. E-scooters, historians will say, were a crucial step in the development of PowShoos. You know, Power Shoes, the ones you put on, which make you immediately able to (a) stand almost still, but yet (b) travel at a hundred miles an hour without hitting anyone.

Back in the time of now, living as we now do at this historic moment in transport history, we have to make do with our clunky old e-scooters, and here is another thought from me on e-scooters, along with all these thoughts.

Google is starting to send me emails with links to articles about e-scooter hiring and e-scooter sharing. But if you google these subjects, you also find pieces saying that these ideas are already failing, in places where this is being attempted. This makes perfect sense to me, because what I now say is that shared e-scooter services make little sense.

The only big reason for hiring or sharing an e-scooter now is to find out if you’d like to own one. As soon as e-scooters become at all widely owned, as they are about to in London, we’ll all have friends who can lend us theirs to have a go on, to see if we’d like to own one also. Actual e-scooter sharing will be huge, informally. But it won’t be an organised “service”, public or private, because it won’t need to be. And anyway, as soon as you even see an e-scooter in action, you can see if an e-scooter would suit you. It’s not complicated. What you see is what you’ll get.

Consider the current domination of laptop computers. That likewise spread owner-to-owner. There were never any big laptop sharing or hiring services. There didn’t need to be.

As I explained in my last e-scooter posting, a huge attraction of e-scooters is that you can cling onto them when travelling but not actually riding on them. You can carry them, and as the video adverts for e-scooters that Google is now attaching to my internet reading are explaining, you can put an e-scooter into the boot of a car, which you cannot do easily with a bike, unless you are something freakish like a member of a sports bike racing team. You can even put an e-scooter into the boot of a taxi. All of which makes e-scooters very appealing compared to their big competitors, biking or walking. Biking is too cumbersome. (What do you do with the damn bike when you aren’t biking?) Walking is too slow and can’t do longer distances.

Bike hiring is the answer to the problem of what you do with a bike once you get off it and need then to abandon it. E-scooter hiring, on the other hand, is the answer to a problem which does not exist. When you get off your e-scooter, you hang on to it. Until you get to work, where you store it, or until you get home, ditto. Otherwise, you keep it with you.

To put it another way, the e-scooter is, above all, personal. You will own your personal e-scooter. Or, like me, you won’t, but will note with interest that millions of others are doing this.

Bike sharing schemes required a massive amount of cumbersome politics to get established, which was endured because bike sharing schemes solve an actual problem. But all plans for e-scooter sharing schemes will be overwhelmed by the simple process of e-scooter people just buying their own e-scooters. All that is needed, politically, is for e-scooters to be allowed.

As of right now, e-scooters are very expensive. E-Scooter Man, whom I recently met and talked with, twice, paid the best part of a a thousand quid for his. Soon, e-scooters will plunge in price to nearer a hundred quid. They will also get a lot less heavy and less bulky, even than they are now, what with their portability being such a big deal.

Then, watch them fly off the shelves.

Two cats and a squirrel above the China Works Tower front door

I posted earlier in the week about the China Works Tower. By the time I visited it, I had already read this:

Here, a group of carved figures examine an impressive collection of pots and vases — striking relief created by master craftsman George Tinworth in around 1878. Look a little closer, and what is thought to be leading female artist of her time Hannah Bolton Barlow can be spied seated with her pet cat under her stool.

So, I was ready with my camera for this detail of the building in particular.

Here’s the entire relief on top of the original entrance:

And here I am, looking a little closer like they said, at Hannah Bolton Barlow and her cat:

Who the bloke in the hat might be, I do not know, or all the others.

But also, look at that big vase to the left of her as we look. That’s definitely a lion, and on the narrow bit at the top, I believe I see a squirrel.

It’s like these pottery people had seen The Internet coming, and knew just how to get noticed by it.

Inflatable e-scooter

Those e-scooter emails from google really hit the jackpot yesterday evening, with news of this gloriously idiotic contrivance:

Yes, it’s an inflatable e-scooter. And by that I mean, not only can you inflate it. You have to inflate it. Madness, I tell you.

Here’s what must surely be a deeply embarrassed model driving it:

When she was little she dreamed of being a supermodel, striding out onto a catwalk and quickly parlaying that into being a movie star. But now look at what she’s doing. It’s like Idiot Toys never stopped and this was the subject of yesterday’s posting there. (And I for one wish it never had stopped.)

I’d be very happy to be proved wrong about this, but as of now, here’s my take on this contraption. The whole point of e-scooters is how convenient they are and how small they are. So, you do not want them occupying as much road space as a small motorbike, and you need to be able to unfold them and fold them up in a single figure number of seconds. This thing has to be inflated. How the hell long does that take? Then when you’ve finished, you have to uninflate it. How long does that take? No. This is altogether too much faffing about, and it defeats about eighty percent of the point of having an e-scooter.

A small platform the size of a small skateboard, with tiny wheels at each end and a stick with handles at the top at the front end, that folds up and down. All pushed along the road by an electric motor that weighs nothing and occupies no space at all. That’s what an e-scooter is. The e-scooter has already been designed! It already works! One of the many things that an e-scooter is not is a giant airbag on wheels.

The China Works Tower

A while back I was walking along by the River, just upstream from Lambeth Bridge, and photoed this photo (number 5 of these) of the China Works Tower (thank you commenter Alastair for identifying it):

Also a while ago now, I went back there, yes, to photo stuff like all the signs at the other end of that link, but basically to check out this China Works building from close-up:

In an earlier posting here about would-be applier of architectural decoration Adam Nathaniel Furman, I said:

Furman intends to apply ornament with colourful abandon.

But, not the old sort of ornament that the Victorians liked to do, and against whom the original Modernists reacted with such disgust. …

Well, the above photos are of just this old sort of ornament, the sort that Furman doesn’t want to do. But, technologically, he intends to use very similar techniques. Ceramics. Also known as: China. (Odd that, naming a material after the big old country where they got the idea from. Are there any strange things called, in foreign parts, Britain or England? So, how’s your meat? Okay, but it could use a dash of Britain. Your skirt’s falling down, try using an England.)

This China Works Tower is surrounded and jostled aggressively by modern buildings, designed by the sort of people who grew up believing all the old sort of ornament to be an aesthetic abomination, or at the very least an aesthetic dead-end.

The most aggressive architectural jostler is a fire station, immediately the other side of a very narrow road. Which happens to be the start of Lambeth High Street, which is odd but there you go. Here are photos I took of all that jostling, with the fire station in the middle photo here:

You can see the white roof of the fire station in the photo at the top of this posting.

Luckily, the China Works Tower is not entirely isolated, and is hence not totally smothered by later buildings. It was once only a small part of a bigger collection of buildings, and a decent chunk of those earlier buildings remains, attached to the Tower and keeping it company:

There was a lot of sunshine and shade colliding on the facade of the Tower, so that doesn’t look so good there. But the blander, less decorated and bigger stretch of the old building was easier to photo, as you can see.

I shouldn’t grumble too much. At least the Tower survived, along with a chunk of the earlier buildings it presided over. The Tower was the architectural advert, so to speak, for a real business, one that survived longer than most Victorian-era enterprises, way past World War 2. And then the Tower was saved by an early manifestation of the Conservation Movement, in the form of two rich fogeys, aesthetically speaking. The link above, in paragraph one of this, concerning the history of this place and what they’re now doing with it is well worth a follow, so here is that link again.

I wouldn’t want London to consist only of such ornamented antiquities, but I am glad that quite a lot of such oddities still survive, and that they now look like having a decent future, to follow their distinguished past. And I am glad to have lived long enough to have experienced a time when this past can be easily learned about. During the last century, I would see such a building, wonder about it for about one minute, and then forget it and move on to the next equally baffling oddity.

Another e-scooter sighting – and a couple of e-scooter quotes

This afternoon an electric scooter and its rider went past me and immediately turned a corner. I had no camera on me, but I scuttled after it anyway, to check that it really was electric. This is because electric scooters are so compact that the only way you can tell for sure that they’re electric is if they carry on for fifty yards without being pushed along by foot. Otherwise, you just can’t be sure.

These things may still be illegal, but they are already a fact of London life. I just nipped out for some milk, and there it was.

In this piece, a good point is made about how electric scooters are going to be much demanded in the aftermath of Lockdown, as a hygiene measure. Politically, this will be hard to resist:

Post-pandemic, will New Yorkers be willing to ride the subway, take a taxi or hire a private driver as they did before? Headlines here in New York already have mentioned a spike in bicycle sales. As New Yorkers re-think their transportation choices going forward in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the use of electric bicycles and electric scooters will undoubtedly become more common throughout the state.

That’s New York, but it could equally well be London. And the difference between an electric scooter and an electric bicycle is that an electric scooter is easy to carry and store while you work, while a bike could be a cumbersome nightmare by comparison.

Bikes are only built the complicated way that they are so you can peddle them. E-scooters just need charging up, and pushed by foot only in a power emergency. Or, you can just carry it, if necessary on a bus or train. (Will e-scooters be allowed on the Tube? They should be. Far bigger suitcases already are.)

Far later than I should have, I recently told Google to email me with e-scooter news, and here’s a bit from a press release I got a few days back, from Ollie Chadwick, Managing Director of this enterprise:

At the present time, eScooters are entirely legal in many countries and cities. In the UK they are permitted on private land and commercial sites. However, despite eBikes and foot-scooters being legal on the public road, eScooters are not – although they are in widespread use. It is this anomaly that requires clarification, together with a sensible ‘code of usage’.

Allowed, is what he is basically saying. I agree.

I can’t say about the rest of the world, because I seldom visit this place and have yet to do the relevant internet searching. But e-scooters are, I’m now betting, the next big thing in London transport.

B-1B selfies

If I were Senior Airman River Bruce, I’d be mighty proud of this photo:

Those are mechanics, so it makes perfect sense for them to put themselves in their photos. And well done Senior Airman Bruce for including them in his. Or hers, maybe? Air-man suggests his, but what do I know? Either way, it’s a great photo, which underlines how many man hours go into keeping one airplane like that flying.

With thanks to Austin Bay.

LATER: One thing did puzzle me. What was all this talk of “BONE”? Simple, it’s a One thing. B-One.

Out near London Gateway

A little clutch of photos of a decaying jetty, photoed just beyond Tilbury on the north side of the Estuary, in September 2013:

From this spot I could also see, in the far distance, the first few cranes of London Gateway. I made several trips to inspect these, around then:

There is nothing else as big as these cranes to be seen anywhere near them, and in their visual impact on their surroundings they remind me of nothing so much as one of those medieval cathedrals, in a town than never got much bigger. (Like Ely.)

According to Wikipedia, there are now twelve cranes up and running. There’ll eventually be twenty four.

One more such expedition to those parts probably wouldn’t kill me. Or then again it might. In London, everything is close together, and there are buses and trains everywhere. Not out there.