Shrinking batteries unleash DIY vehicles onto streets of New York
Though the creative contraptions might help riders get around traffic jams, they also pose serious safety concerns.
New Yorkers are used to streets filled with strange sights. The latest phenomenon? Unorthodox vehicles, sometimes built DIY-style, including a Frankensteinesque electric scooter-wheelchair hybrid and a rideable suitcase.
Although these contraptions might be useful for zipping around congestion in Midtown Manhattan, they can also present safety risks. Christopher Maag, a metro reporter at The New York Times, wrote about the current trend for his column, “Street Wars.”
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Maag about these urban chariots and the people who ride them. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: It is quite the assortment of vehicles, I guess you’d call them, that you point out in this column. I guess the first question is, why are we seeing so many now?
Christopher Maag: Sure, I think that we’re really seeing this change on the streets in New York City and cities around the world because these batteries have gotten so small, so light and so cheap. So you really can strap them to anything you like — if you’re a backyard engineer all the way up to if you have lots of investment dollars to engineer a new complex vehicle from scratch, you can do that too.
Ryssdal: One hates to channel the nanny state here, but we regulate traffic and those sorts of things fairly extensively in cities and states around this country. These things that you you highlight in the column are well nigh unregulatable.
Maag: Yes, there are some attempts to regulate them with the more standard electric bicycles. There’s a large movement afoot to try to get them to be registered and to have large, easily visible license plates so that everybody can see them, including video cameras and surveillance cameras if one should commit a crime. These smaller vehicles, if you’re riding a skateboard that you hack together in your garage or one of these one-wheels, those are illegal already to ride in places like many bridges and bike paths, but regulating them is difficult, in part because catching them is difficult. They’re fast and maneuverable.
Ryssdal: Which is, I chuckle, but that’s sort of a recipe for disaster if you’re a pedestrian, right?
Maag: Definitely, there are a lot of people with complaints about these kinds of vehicles. Most of the complaints are about the electric bicycles because those are the most numerous. Occasionally, somebody like The New York Post will come out with a more targeted story about especially these electric unicycles, which seem to be particularly precarious, although people who ride them love them and say they’re safe.
Ryssdal: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I was just chuckling at the, at the electric unicycle thing because unicycles are tricky to begin with.
Maag: Yeah, I don’t really know how they feel safe, but they ride them all over, on all types of roads.
Ryssdal: Without trying to bring up the specter of congestion pricing and Gov. [Kathy] Hochul, the infrastructure of New York City is already crowded. My guess is that these folks don’t stay in bike lanes. What’s the, what’s the roadway safety issue here?
Maag: I think that’s, that’s a real issue. I think that many of these people have no protection. They’re going at such speeds, and their vehicles are so hard to see, that they’re really putting themselves at risk — and also pedestrians at risk. In their favor, they are making most use of available space. And I bike on the streets all the time; I bike most days. And I do think that one argument would be to have lower expectations. I just expect people to do dumb things because it’s New York City and I choose to ride on a bike.
Ryssdal: So drive defensively out there. What’s the weirdest one you saw?
Maag: The weirdest one was the one that I led with. It was Jimmy Cho’s hacked-together jitney, where he took a stand-up scooter and took it apart and welded it to a wheelchair and used it to be vaguely menacing in the center of Herald Square.
Ryssdal: What could possibly go wrong?