The original note, as written at the time
Other personal mobility devices can be explored from standing scooter designs to horse inspired designs with high seats, and many others.
Ongoing development
Personal mobility devices worth exploring: standing scooter designs, horse-inspired designs with high seats, and many others between them.
The phrase worth keeping is horse-inspired, because it identifies something the industry has abandoned. A horse is a mobility device with a high seat, an independent gait and a relationship with its rider — you sit above the crowd rather than in it, and the machine moves like a body rather than like a cart.
The high seat is the functional part. At a metre and a half a rider sees over traffic, is seen by drivers, and is out of the exhaust. That is a completely different experience of a street from a scooter at knee height, and it costs nothing but geometry.
The standing scooter is the opposite bet — low, minimal, cheap, and it won because it folds. The interesting question for a designer is what comes between them: a device with the scooter’s cost and the horse’s eye level.
The serious constraint is stability. Anything tall on small wheels falls, and the failure is at speed and into traffic. So the horse-inspired class needs a wide track, a low centre of mass and suspension that keeps the wheels down, which is a different engineering problem from making a scooter faster.
The right way to explore the space is to build three and ride them for a month, not to draw twelve and pick the prettiest.
Mobility design is riding, not rendering.