Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Saturday 26 July 2008

One foot on, one foot off

The hippety-hoppety antics required to propel a scooter (the children's version not a Vespa clone) surely rules it out as a serious mode of locomotion. Or does it?

The Swedes don't think so and they're pretty serious about most things. They use them for personal transport in high-bay warehouses.

The normal way of getting around a warehouse is by some kind of forklift. But that's wasteful if your journey doesn't require you to extract or re-install a load. Imagine instead a scooter rather like this but scaled up for a full-grown adult. Notably with larger diameter wheels. No brakes needed.

The floors of high-bay warehouses are deliberately made smooth so that forklifts can be aligned precisely with individual bays in the racking. Perfect for scooting. As I watched one dashing Nordic individual, with flowing yellow locks, hip-hop off into the distance it looked like fun. But perhaps that's also the drawback. In Britain we're not inclined to think of work as fun.