So long, Segway

The Last Straw: It'll be five years next week since a startled world first learned of a new form of transport that would be to the car, its inventor claimed, "what the car was to the horse and buggy".

In the intervening period, car sales have remained stubbornly buoyant. And in Ireland, at least, the horse and buggy is still easily outselling the Segway, the "personal transporter" for which there were such high hopes.

I had my doubts about the Segway's usefulness when it emerged early on that Leonardo da Vinci had never sketched a rudimentary version of it in 1493. If it had been any good, the renaissance genius would surely have foreshadowed it with a doodle in his notebooks: an idle thought that would need to await the invention of the battery, the computer, and the too-lazy-to-walk 21st-century commuter before becoming reality. But the notebooks had nothing of the sort. Da Vinci's silence on the Segway issue looked damning.

The new invention also had an image problem for which no amount of environmental friendliness could compensate. Yes it had zero emissions, and thanks to its clever weight distribution system, it could run over a pedestrian's foot without breaking it.

But a Segway user still looked like he'd been standing on his two-wheeled lawnmower - trying to start it, perhaps - when the mower went mad and ran down the street with him still on board.

Another problem was that, instead of competing with car-based transport as its maker intended, the Segway appeared more like an alternative to walking. Walking was hard to improve on from an environmental viewpoint. Foot-based commuters were already low in emissions (unless they'd been in a Mexican restaurant recently) and they benefited from the exercise of which the Segway threatened to rob them.

True, there were professions for which the invention seemed ideal. Anyone who's ever walked down Dublin's Grafton Street in the wake of the Garda mounted patrol will know that police horses have major emission issues. You may even have stepped in these issues on occasion. Until someone invents a new police horse, with a catalytic converter, the Segway must be worth consideration. But like most professions targeted by the inventor, police forces have not adopted it any great numbers.

The machine was already struggling in 2003 when President Bush, an enthusiast, was filmed using one at home. This was a make-or-break opportunity to showcase the Segway's self-balancing technology, which deploys gyroscopes to calculate the user's centre of gravity - 100 times per second - and adjust position accordingly. Unfortunately, the leader of the free world forgot to turn it on, and fell off.

The Segway manufacturers could console themselves that Dubya had once famously fallen off a couch, grazing his forehead, and that couch sales didn't suffer. But the couch was a well-established product by then, and its safety had not hitherto been questioned.

Five years on, the makers' hopes that the Segway would sweep the planet have been revised downwards. The company is now targeting niche users like the golf community, who have a higher than average embarrassment threshold and a proven record of using products (sweaters, trousers, etc) that normal people would not be seen dead in. Even so, it seemed premature when the Financial Times recently included the Segway in a list of failed inventions.

Comparison with the bicycle may be instructive. From a two-wheeled "walking machine" in 1816 to the "bone-shaker" of 1865, the bicycle had a long gestation. Early on, thanks to the unique interaction between its metal wheels and the era's cobbled streets, it didn't so much calculate your centre of gravity as give you a pain in it. And even when pneumatic tyres were introduced to provide a mediation service between the cyclist and the road, the bike's lack of self-balancing technology remained a serious drawback.

Mark Twain learned to cycle in the 1880s, when it was still an eccentric enough activity for his lessons (he had an instructor and all) to attract an audience. He wrote an essay about the experience of wobbling up and down the street while a young cynic walked beside him making supportive comments such as: "My, but don't he rip along!" Even allowing for some exaggeration - Twain insisted on referring to the handlebars as a "rudder" - the essay is a useful reminder of how strange the bicycle once seemed to a generation more used to riding horses.

Cycling has had its setbacks over the years, including the discovery that a sketch of a two-wheeled pedal device in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks was a 20th-century hoax. The great genius didn't invent the bicycle either, it seems. So you never know: there may be hope for the Segway yet.