Move over brompton!

Irish passport thank you very much!

Disowned.

YEAH WHATEVER. You still sound funny when you talk.

Well, I was an archer.

I always had you down as a darts man, no idea why...

;)

Hippy just likes to chuck shit at other shit for fun.

from the FAQs:

   [How heavy is the YikeBike?](http://www.yikebike.com/faq/how-heavy-is-the-yikebike)      
            The YikeBike weighs around 10kg with a full battery and air in the tyres. 

how does holding electrical charge and having air in the tyres affect the weight? haha

from the FAQs:

how does holding electrical charge and having air in the tyres affect the weight? haha

You need to refer to the time travel thread for the answer I'm afraid.

http://www.lfgss.com/thread45419.html

I sit in front of a computer all day, I need all the exercise I can get, and I'm like an increasing number of people.

It's only in the 21st Century where we no longer have 'activity', but 'exercise'.

You have to see it in the wider transport context.

This isn't the only whizzy, gadgety people mover that's being worked on or is already in use. There are other things, like horizontal 'travelators' at airports etc. (I don't mean vertical escalatators--I hate it when people call escalators 'travelators', which architects seem to have decided is the euphemistic new term for them, or something), the Segway, more and more electric bikes (which, if people actually pedal them are good mobility devices, and very suitable for a range of contexts, such as electrically-assisted long commutes, or for people with certain mobility difficulties, etc.), and so forth. No doubt there are many more inventors working on other ideas like these. Oh, and the range of the Yike Bikes will improve. Look at the leaps and bounds that battery technology for electric bikes has taken over the years. I've been following those developments through A to B magazine for quite a while.

The more of these options will be available, the more people will get used to the idea of assisted and increasingly less limited travel. You say they already have, through driving. Yes, but the above devices are a very different order. People do use cars to make stupidly short trips, but the Yike Bike et al. are even more likely than cars to replace normally human-powered trips down to the corner shop. They seem to me to be a distinct next step to a more sedentary and inactive lifestyle. We already have mobility scooters. These are very useful for people who have genuinely lost mobility, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were used by people who still had mobility but gradually lose what mobility they had left through the use of their scooter.

The ultimate next step after that, which is obviously some time away still, much as I hope it'll never happen, is to invent devices that move us around our homes, cutting out a lot of that vital micro-exercise that we get merely by walking from room to room. That's not so unlikely a horror vision of the future--already, you have a massive industry developing that's concerned with inventing households robots, making us more and more passive. I sit in front of a computer all day, I need all the exercise I can get, and I'm like an increasing number of people.

All these inventions are fun and whizzy. Cars and lorries are a great invention, but people use them in stupid and pointless ways all the time, like going a mile down the road to pick up a pint of orange juice. Cars are a status symbol to many people. SImilar things will happen with these inventions. I still hope that they'll never become widespread, but forty years ago people probably thought that clothes dryers in individual homes wouldn't become widespread.

I'm sure it's a lot of fun inventing this stuff, but it wouldn't be the first time that an inventor might eventually have to throw his or her hands up to say 'Ah, but I didn't intend it to be used in this way. I only invented it and I'm completely innocent of any harm done later.'

A good example is Kalashnikov's thinking about his invention:

http://www.philosophynow.org/issue59/59forge.htm

There's obviously a slightly different mechanism here, as inventing a weapon is quite a few grades different from inventing a mobility device, and Kalashnikov of course doesn't want to claim that he's innocent of any harm done, but some.

Immobility kills, too, and reduces lifespan. Current research indicates, for instance, that not riding a bike regularly is twenty times as dangerous as riding one (simply calculated from research into the resultant lifespan, i.e. factoring in current road traffic casualties). Being immobile is not so widespread now, but who knows what might happen when people might have got more used to it?

Anyway, I just think we need to protect and promote human-powered wherever we can and be very wary of these devices. It's a subject I'm passionately concerned about.

Very well reasoned argument, eloquently put. Has some intelligent person hacked Oliver's account? I want bad jokes.

Current research indicates, for instance, that not riding a bike regularly is twenty times as dangerous as riding one

This is just fucking GOLD. I'm going to be quoting that daily to the immobility freaks I work with.