St. Pete by Segway
Paul V. Stavros is the fastest man on the sidewalks of St. Petersburg.
He is a big man, broad-shouldered and tall, but always well-coifed and dressed for office work in long sleeves and a collar. Yet despite his business attire and the searing heat, Stavros doesn’t break a sweat while running errands downtown -- even at three times the speed of mere pedestrians.
That’s because Stavros, 49, rides a Segway, Dean Kamen’s two-wheeled brainchild that looks like a cross between of a scooter and a pogo stick. “When I was a kid, they had the Flintstones and the Jetsons,” Stavros said. “I liked the Jetsons. I’ve always been a futurist.”
Stavros’s office is replete with the trappings of a hopeless technophile. His desk is cluttered with a desktop computer, a world-wide cell phone, his local cell phone (with an integrated digital camera) and a Palm Visor that he has used to check GPS data from the equator. (It is currently loaded with the entire Holy Bible, “in case I feel motivated or something,” he said.) At home, Stavros has another digital camera and three laptops, including a Power Mac G4.
Not everyone is as tech-savvy as Stavros. In line for the drive-through ATM, he attracts the envious stares of pedestrians, the slack-jawed wonderment of drivers and the awed giggles of children.
“I just thought it was so cool and neat. I’d never seen one before,” said Beverly Littlejohn, the press officer for Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry, which owns a Segway.
Kamen -- who holds more than 150 patents in such fields as medicine, climate control and aviation -- delivered the Segway to the American public in January 2002 amid speculation about how it would alter the urban landscape by eliminating the need to walk. The electric-powered Segway requires no controls to operate. It simply reads Stavros’s mind. When the power runs low, it can be plugged into a wall outlet and recharged. It also costs $5,000.
The bottom-heavy machine is steadied by five ultra-sensitive gyroscopes that perceive subtle shifts in weight, which the on-board processor translates into instructions for speed and direction. By leaning forward ever so slightly, Stavros rockets across the basement practice room next to his office in the Palladium Theater, where he has been executive director since co-founding it in 1998 with the local philanthropist Bill Hoff.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Can I ride it?’ and I say ‘I’d love to let you, but I just can’t do it.’”
That’s because they haven’t completed the two-hour orientation that Segway asked Stavros to attend before using the device. When Stavros purchased his on Amazon.com after seeing it featured on the Today Show, Segway sent him packing off to a Disney hotel in Orlando for the training course. There are only two Segway dealers in Florida -- one car dealership and one electronic machine shop -- and both offer their own in-house tutorials.
(President Bush, for example, tumbled from a Segway last week at his Kennebunkport, Maine, home; he had not taken the certification course.)
Florida regulates the Segway as an “electronic personal assistive mobility device” -- the Segway is the only EPAMD in existence -- exempting it from the licensing and safety standards applied to vehicles. But if a county deems Segways unsafe for its roads and sidewalks, its own EPAMD laws can supersede the state’s. Pinellas County has not taken up the issue.
Stavros has never met any other Segway owners, and had not even seen the device until he attended his orientation. “I’m surprised there aren’t more in St. Pete,” he said, but added that he wasn’t completely satisfied with the device. “That’s kind of the weird part; I feel like a freak or something,” he said, underscoring the point that the Segway has not revolutionized city life the way Kamen and its admirers thought it would. “At five grand, it’s either for business or for guys like me who’re just stupid.” A Segway spokesperson declined to share sales figures.
“It’s something I could afford and I wanted to try it. You know, when you’re working [at the theater] 12 to 14 hours a day, it’s nice to get out... I kid people that I live in a 12,000-square-foot home and that people entertain me every night. It’s just that there are 14 toilets to clean.”
Stavros said, “I just wanted to see people again.” At 17 miles per hour, the Segway’s top speed, he may not be seeing much of anyone, but they are certainly seeing him.
