City Segway Tours
Kelly Reilly
How does it feel to be this awesome?
City Segway Tours' pamphlet says: "Imagine cruising effortlessly through parks and along sidewalks while receiving a great orientation, informative, historical, and current-day information, heaps of unique and fascinating stories, fantastic photo ops and superb personal service from your guide."
Decider says: CST could save themselves a lot of money by simply printing, "Ride a fucking Segway around the city" on their pamphlets, since, for locals, that's undoubtedly the biggest draw. If your pride is preventing you from signing up for a tour group, heed the words of CST Operations Manager Matt Golas. He says that the five-year-old company attracts small groups that usually consist of half locals and half tourists, who both tend to be inexperienced with Segway riding. But at $70 for a three-hour daytime tour or $60 for a two-hour evening tour, there's little reason not to pop that motorized cherry. (Also, they're offering tours for $65 through the end of the month.)
Okay, okay. Enough. I'll cut to the chase and tell you what it's like to ride a Segway. When it was first unveiled in 2001, it was little more than a slowly moving punch line (it maxes out at 12.5 mph)—inventor Dean Kamen didn't help matters when he announced that the Segway would be the death to the car and possibly rid the world of the scourge that is walking. His invention isn't quite that revolutionary, but it is a hell of a lot of fun. The Segway is surprisingly low to the ground, small, and easy to operate. Essentially, it's a pogo stick on a pair of wheels connected by a small, sturdy platform: The handles are used to steer, and shifting your weight onto your toes or heels controls movement. To stop, simply push as much forward on one foot as you do backwards on the other. It quickly becomes second nature, even though it seems confusing and intimidating at first. That said, it is not able to handle rugged terrains, and the tour's path along Grant Park, Millennium Park, The Field Museum, and other nearby attractions is well-suited to the machine's ability to navigate paved surfaces. This isn't in the six-minute training video they show before letting you loose with a tour guide, but managing slanted curbs when crossing the street is one of the more counterintuitive maneuvers you'll have to handle on the fly. Here's a hint: You're supposed to bend your knees and accelerate. Also, the Segway has a zero-turn radius, and coupled with the fact that it works best on paved roads means this isn't the time to show off. Here's proof that even small mounds of dirt and the Segway don't get along:
The company's pamphlet makes this clear by mentioning that the Segway is designed for "pedestrian environments," and the video drives home how hot-dogging is a bad idea. Here's an excerpt from the training video on all the ways you can wipe out that we've, uh, enhanced:
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Still, none of this can discount the thrill and unabashed fun you feel as the wind whips through your hair at 8.8 mph. There's a reason GOB from Arrested Development rides around in a Segway: It makes you feel like an authority figure lording over your minions by carting around in your personal chariot. Indeed, while tooling around Chicago on a Segway, it was hard not to greet the foolish pedestrians still dragging around the city on their outmoded legs. (Actually, I found myself rolling up to random women on the sidewalk and announcing myself with an especially swarthy, "Hello, ladies.") Like walking, the stigma surrounding Segways are a thing of the past—at the worst, people gave our six-person group small stares, and at best, they gave us thumbs up and asked us to stop and take photos while they repeatedly uttered, "Cool!"
Kelly Reilly
It felt a lot like this scene from Back To The Future Part II, albeit without the thrill of stealing from a random little girl on the street:
Thankfully, the focus of CST is more on riding around on a Segway than on the obligatory tour-guide banter. You don't see all the sights, but you do see a good deal of them: Leaving from the tour offices on Randolph Street, you head south by the lake past Grant Park to attractions like Soldier Field, the Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium, and Meigs Field before ultimately arriving back three hours later. As a lifelong Chicagoan, I didn't expect to learn much during the ride. Though, while riding back on Michigan Avenue, our tour guide Nate Leavitt informed us that the number of legs off the ground in the equestrian statues in the nearby parks indicated the fate of its rider—for instance, if the horse has both front legs in the air, the rider died in battle. True, I probably heard about this in high school and a simple Google search would have yielded the same information, but chances are fellow natives will pick up a tidbit or two that'll be useful the next time you play Trivial Pursuit.
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The upshot of having a tour group on Segways is you can choose to not pay attention to the tour guide's information and instead wheel around the immediate area. You won't be yelled at for not listening or straying from the path. In fact, it's encouraged: Entire stretches of the tour have built-in detours. At Meigs Field, our group was encouraged to go "race" around a long and winding path for fun. That's the whole point of being on a Segway, isn't it?
Tourist trap? Partially. If you've got out-of-town friends and you're tired of driving around and pointing out factoids, suit up and tool around with Chicago Segway Tours. Hell, even if you've got nothing to do on a Saturday morning, it's more than worth a shot.
The old horse next to the new one.Kelly Reilly
