World Travel Guide Online

The Ultimate Marriage of Culture and Geekdom:
Touring Paris on a Segway
Paris, France

Paris is not cheap. Trying to see Paris on a tight budget is like trying to uncork a bottle of wine with a spoon. It ain’t happening. Once I surrendered to going broke in Paris, I took the plunge in breathtaking style and toured the city atop the coolest vehicle designed since the advent of the wheel; a Segway.

American-run Mike’s Bike Tours operates out of four cities in Europe (Amsterdam, Munich, Barcelona and Paris) and offers affordable, much raved about city tours that somehow manage not to drift into that embarrassing, sheep-like, Rube Tour arrangement that gives me indigestion just thinking about it. I dropped into the Mike’s Bike Tours office to get the skinny on a tour and to make use of one of the scant few clean, free bathrooms in all of Paris. While I was there, the whole idea of a bike tour vanished like Bush’s approval points when I saw the eight Segways parked in the corner of the shop.

If you’ve been living in the jungles of New Guinea for the last few years, you may have missed out on the blizzard of free publicity that the Segway people have received, kind of like what you’re reading now, for their amazing new vehicle. A Segway is a revolutionary two wheeled, self balancing, personal transportation device. An internal gyroscope and numerous lightning-quick processors keeps the Segway and the person operating it upright while they cruise lazily and enviably down the road at speeds up to 12.5 MPH (It’s rumored that a souped up Segway can go up to 30 MPH, but apparently going that fast on a Segway is terrifying). Segways are slowly being introduced into urban areas in the U.S. with mail carriers and street cops in several cities testing them for professional use. There has been some fierce debate on how and if the vehicle should be used in a typical urban environment. Should they be forced to stay on the sidewalks, bike paths or streets? Should people on Segways adhere to traffic laws like cars, etc, etc? None of that mattered while I was standing in the Mike’s Bike Tours shop, quivering and stuttering with excitement, like the time Homer Simpson saw the ad for the free trampoline. (Roughly paraphrased; “Gaa!! Seg-ma-way! Sem-go-away! Weg-se-may! Aaiig!”) All I knew when I saw those things parked there was that it was imperative that I get on one immediately, even if it meant a diet of bread and jam for a week to equalize the hit to my budget. And so it went.

Segways!

Mike’s Bike Tours were the first to bring Segways into France and they still appear to be the only Segway game in town. The Segways draw a lot of stares on the street. If the oh-wow factor weren’t enough for bystanders when you zipped past them with surprising speed and maneuverability on something that God never intended to stand up without a kick stand, when you stopped on a dime and whipped through a full 360° rotation with zero turning radius, onlookers literally went to pieces. At every tourist sight we visited, people stopped looking at whatever hundreds of years old historic monument they were standing in front of and turned their cameras on us. In addition to that attention, we had a camera crew from the American Tech TV network following us on our tour – apparently the Segways have attracted more free media attention to Mike’s Bike Tours than a Dennis Rodman birthday party – who interviewed me after the tour and kindly informed me that I was a natural for TV. I was like, “[Sniff] Does the word ‘duh’ mean anything to you guys?”

Segways are the most intuitive and easy to learn means of transportation that I have ever navigated. Easier than a car. Way easier than a bike. Even easier than an electric wheelchair. The forward and backward motion of the Segway is triggered simply by leaning forward or backward. Standing still requires that you keep the foot platform horizontal. Hence, all that it takes to pilot a Segway is a very basic sense of balance (I’m talking normal, walking and standing in one place kind of basic balance). You steer by twisting a switch on the left handlebar (twist forward to turn right, back to turn left). The learning curve on a Segway varies from 30 seconds for a relatively gifted person up to 10 minutes for a nervous drunk, but either way, after about 20 minutes the thing feels like a natural extension of your body. Starting, stopping, spinning around, backing and turning, one handed while shooting pictures with your free hand can all be performed as if it were second nature. In fact, the only mildly delicate part about using a Segway is the mount and dismount. Since any leaning activates motion, if your mount/dismount is less than steady, the thing can either speed away right out of your hands or lurch backward and smash your shins. While idling on a Segway, there’s the smallest perceptible swaying back and forth as you and your Segway work like symbiotic entities to stay still and upright, otherwise it’s pretty much like standing directly on the ground with your own two feet. You don’t even need to hold the handle bars while you are idling and if you’re bold enough, you can even cruise at full speed with no hands, that is, until a turn is required. Your can inch ahead at the slowest possible crawl for delicate maneuvering or lean into near instantaneous full speed acceleration. The Segway will start to complain by way of a loud, unhealthy grinding noise if you get ballsy like I did 45 seconds after my first mount and start going full speed in reverse into tight turns, otherwise you are only limited by your confidence and the speed range that you have selected.

There are three pace settings on a Segway. You select your speed range when you start the thing up by way of three color-coded keys, each of which allows for a different maximum speed. Black will keep you at 6 MPH per hour or less, perfect for winding through dense, slack jawed crowds at tourist sights. If you have relatively bare, open road in front of you, then you key it up with the yellow and sail away at about 8 MPH. If you are in a hurry, whip out the red key and you can rev it up to 12.5 MPH. We did most of the tour on the black key. With the number of people that were crowding us and the knobs who inexplicably felt that it was safe to jump directly in front of us to get a better look at the Segways, we really couldn’t have gone any faster without flattening some toes. When it came time to head back to the shop and we were only going down deserted streets, we restarted with the yellow key and covered serious ground. Once we were back at the shop, the red key was offered to anyone who was feeling fearless. Not surprisingly, all of us guys were up for it while the ladies hung back and let the boys work through their respective testosterone moments. When it was my turn to red key it, I wasn’t prepared for the acceleration. On the surface, 12.5 MPH really doesn’t seem like much. I’ve gone just as fast on a bicycle (actually much faster), but for some reason the same speeds while standing on a Segway seem much more break-neck.

I had a mission to accomplish while red keying it. Mike’s Bike Tours does not take credit cards, so a visit to a cash machine was in order. Having been a veritable Segway prodigy, they felt I was a safe bet to get to the cash machine and back on the red key without killing someone’s child, pet or myself. I stepped onto my Segway, glanced at my group, raised an eyebrow into a menacing position and tilted that mother from zero to 12.5 MPH in about .5 seconds. I was tearing down the sidewalk. The Segway was bucking back into me, a physical signal the Segway automatically gives you when you are pushing it faster than your selected key range will allow, but I was red keying it, so I was probably, in fact, very close to pushing its physical limitations. I was coming to an open courtyard where skater punks and tiny dogs were running free when we had cut through earlier that day, so I eased up. Once I was sure the coast was clear, I laid rubber back to max speed. It was a glorious geek moment. I traveled the two blocks to the cash machine in seconds. Despite being one of the least essential items for survival (in the hunter-gatherer sense of the concept, a la “Fight Club”), I knew at that moment that I was going to own a Segway before I died.

Eiffel Tower

Oh right, there was a four hour tour of Paris in there somewhere too! The speed and mobility of the Segways allowed us to blow past walkers and bus tours alike as we cruised past the Eiffel Tower, Hôtel des Invalides (Napoleon’s final resting place), Parc du Champ de Mars, Place de la Concorde and the Jardin des Tuileries just to name a few. The young tour guide spoke to us at every sight, but with the Segways consuming all of my attention, I hardly remember any of the details, with the exception of the forehead slapping revelation of the secret side entrance to the Louvre – about 100 yards away from the long lines leading into the Pyramid entrance – where people in-the-know could blow past all the Rubes (i.e. me two days earlier) and amble right in with no wait.

Louve

The Segway buzz stayed with me well into the evening. I couldn’t stop babbling about it to my hostel-mates and I immediately loaded my digital pictures and video clips from the tour into my laptop and held a little multimedia Segway presentation for anyone who would watch.

A Paris Segway tour ain’t cheap and as you may have noticed, you will absorb very little actual information about the city itself while on the tour, but it will be the greatest thing you do in Paris – maybe the greatest thing you do in Europe – and perhaps you will accidentally get some shots of Paris attractions in the background as you fill your digital camera’s memory card with shots of the Segways.