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I have a (long) bike, not an electric scooter, but it seems to cope fine with the family shopping trip, not always in good weather. What you need is a proper cargo bike. Look here for examples.

For example, heading home after work and a stop by the grocery store a couple of years ago.
Studded tires are useful on ice.
You can tow your kid's bike home in a snow storm..
You can haul a shrubbery to a neighbor's house (it was really heavy, the bike was probably 15 degrees off vertical the whole way).

And if you need to, say, haul 480 lbs (gross weight) up a 31% grade , there's a motor for that.

I'm a little tired of all the negativity. Get a good cargo bike, and ride, and you can do a load of stuff. So the answer is, yes, the electric scooter, or something very like it, is a big part of the answer to our transport problems, and as long as pedaling is still in the picture, it would do a heck of a lot for our health. Over half the commutes in the US are e-bikeable (by commute count, not mileage -- the median commute is 10-12 miles).

Or drive much smaller vehicles.

A cargo bike plus an electric assist will carry a load of groceries and/or a kid or two, and will do it with a daily range that is depressingly competitive with a lot of the e-cars being discussed nowadays (i.e., 40 miles -- 20 in a day on a human-powered cargo bike is a no-brainer). Wouldn't necessarily work in the boonies, but lots and lots of people drive in places that where 20-40 miles per day, most days, is enough.

One hopes that I won't hear the same tired excuses about rain, snow, dark, ice, and locusts; you're not supposed to bike naked (NSFW). That's why we have fenders, raincoats, gloves, and snow tires. What mostly lacks is a place that feels safe enough to ride; what we have now probably IS safe enough, but it seems unsafe, so that's the end of it for most people.

Or maybe the problem is that you think bicycles are slow.

Or maybe you think you'll miss taking your SUV off-roading.

The Acid Test is all about seeing if browsers can properly render intentionally mis-written, broken code, including things that I find it hard to believe that anybody would do on propose on a real-world page.

This misconception seems to come up every time Acid2 gets mentioned on Slashdot.

Broken code was part of the Acid2 test, but far from the primary focus. Read the test guide sometime. The first Acid test didn't use broken code at all; it simply tested implementation of the box model.

It's *just not worth the money*. There are (x) needs for movement outside the home. to list a few:

a. go to work
b. go to school
c. go to market (food, clothing, other mundanities)
d. go to cultural activity (art, music, religion, party, movies, restaurants, etc.)

How can the Segway get me to a/b/c/d faster than:
* walking
* driving
* bicycling
* public transport

the Segway is probably faster than walking. So, a/b are viable to the Segway vs. normally walking. However, shopping is right out - it has no trailer and you need both hands to control it. So you can't go shopping in a Segway. Going to cultural activities is usually done in pairs or groups. The Segway carries one, so it is marginally worse than walking to cultural activities, if walking is the normal method of getting to such activities.

If you normally drive to work or school, the Segway cannot compete in terms of speed, except in the narrow sense of inner city driving where cars are slow and parking is scarce. Otherwise, the Segway loses in every category. The AVERAGE cost of a car in the USA is $8000 per year. So, for $3k more, you get to blast down to the beach on a sunny day at 80mph.

If you normally bicycle to the above mentioned activities, the Segway also loses. Bicycles are easily fitted with pannier bags and trailers, so bicycles are easily outfitted for significant shopping. With an electric assist, similar to the segway, bicycles (as ebikes) can actually compete with automobiles, even in a number of suburban locales. A full on eBike (say, a decent bike converted to a Stokemonkey)with massive panniers and an extra seat for a kid is often less than $2000 - less than half of a Segway, and a damn sight faster as well (A stokemonkey can easily hit un-pedalled speeds of 20mph. Pedalling gets it up to 25 - 30mph). There are other conversion systems for ebikes: Cyclone for instance, and many many manufacturers are coming out with electric assist bikes.

So, the Segway is 50/50 versus walking, loses against a bike, doesn't hold a candle to a car. Now: Public transport.

Public transport works in a few modes: intra-urban transport (such as the NY City Subway or the SF Muni) inter-urban transport (the NJ/NY PATH train, or the SF Bay Area BART system) and inter-city transport (NJ Transit, LIRR, Amtrak near NYC or CalTran for the Bay Area). Obviously, if you're shlepping to NYC from Metuchen or SF from Palo Alto, you're NOT going to do it in a Segway. You'll take NJ Transit or CalTran. If you're going to NYC from Newark you'll take the PATH, Oakland to SF - BART. If you're going to Downtown from (NY) Upper West Side or (SF) Inner Sunset, you'll take public transport. Why? Because in NYC a Segway is TOO SLOW. In SF, you'll never get it past Twin Peaks. So, in these two (and common) examples, the Segway doesn't even hold its own against an even mediocre (MUNI) subway system.

As a consequence, the percieved value of a $5000 scooter (Segway) FAILS against the simple expediencies of Driving long distances, Biking shorter distances, commuting by public transport, and walking three blocks to get some beer and a pack of smokes.

Also, the Segway weighs about 33 kg. (IIRC). The average bike weighs about half that. The average eBike weighs 2/3s that, and goes 3x as fast and costs half as much. A Stokemonkey weighs as much as a Segway, but it's freakin' huge and is more of a slow green substitute for local automobile travel than a simple bike - it can carry a passenger and four sacks of groceries - AND go 2x as fast as a Segway. So, in every possible way, the Segway sucks. It's heavy, slow, has no capacity, and is 5/8 the cost of an average automobile. In other words: It's Useless.

Everyone did the same calculation all at once, and that's why the Segway failed. It was a bad idea with a mediocre execution.

Now - get off your ass and walk.

RS

That discussion doesn't really belong here, but in a web design thread. But apart from cheating (treating the test page specifically), which would be easy to spot, taking time to make Acid2 work means taking time to make the CSS implementation work, there is no "quick fix" to Acid2.

Acid2 doesn't cover everything, far from it, but a poor CSS implementation won't pass Acid2 so if an implementation passes Acid2 it must be a good one. Additional tests will be needed to see if it is a great one. It will be much easier to design pages that work for browsers that pass Acid2 than it will for browsers that don't. Not passing comes in degrees of course, Firefox does better than IE that does better than Netscape 4.

This has some relevance to Geir. Before there was an Acid2 test there was an CSS Acid test, created by Todd Fahrner. When it was written and a long time after none of the browsers came close to pass this test, Geir's CSS implementation did. There is no talk about it today because every modern browser, IE included, pass it today. Hopefully the day will come soon when nobody is going to talk about Acid2 either.

Why not try the geekiest option available? A human-electric hybrid sporty-utility bicycle! I don't think I'd want to go 300-350 miles on one though.

the original acid(1) test

http://style.cleverchimp.com/boxacidtest/
http://style.cleverchimp.com/boxacidtest/vd/

the original acid(1) test

http://style.cleverchimp.com/boxacidtest/
http://style.cleverchimp.com/boxacidtest/vd/