What scooters say about us – Massimo Mantellini

The first thing I think of scooters is that they are a vertical line. From the terrace of this house by the sea in recent months I have watched hundreds of people pass in front of me on a scooter. At one point in the summer, the city administration authorized one of those rental platforms that are so common in large European cities. Then the vertical lines suddenly increased.

The second thing I think of when I see a human on a scooter pass in front of me is a brilliant cartoon from my childhood. Was called The line, and was designed by Osvaldo Cavandoli. In those days, with great style and originality, he promoted a brand of pressure cookers.

too The lineLike scooters, it inhabits its own vertical space: the cartoon takes place (the verb to play is perfect in this case) within a surface without depth and as such completely unnatural.

Also due to this geographical limit, scooters have often received a negative reception from those who first saw them speeding by. Small objects, too thin, two-dimensional and as such absolutely dangerous. A precariousness similar to that of the designer who struggles with a single line to become a story on the page.

Electric bikes, which are currently the twin technology of scooters, awaken less ecumenical feelings in me: feelings of mistrust and disappointment that I struggle a bit to accept, but that remain my own. It will be enough with a pedal stroke and the silent electric motor will replace us; muscle fatigue will be seared, replaced by something else. The electric bicycle is a hoax whose core lies in the denial of the original function. The legs of the young lady who is passing me right now move harmoniously on the pedals, the knees go up and down effortlessly, while the bike runs fast, pushed by something else. Even the expression “assisted pedaling” sounds like a lie: it is not motor assisted pedaling, but quite the opposite. The pedal becomes a switch and the electric motor starts: a hybrid thus unites the old and the new world. The bike object is partially dead silent, but the electric hybrid keeps the body warm. As in comedy Weekend with the dead sometimes a pair of sunglasses will suffice to keep up appearances.

The vertical space of the scooter has consequences. Objects that access it must also remain on the line. The handlebar itself is of a minimum width (43 centimeters), the platform on which we will balance ourselves during the journey expands outside the line for a very limited space (12 centimeters). Thus, the feet will be placed facing each other: so that each scooter rider will look like the acrobat on the steel wire stretched between the twin towers on a day in August 1974.

In other less elegant cases, the drivers force vertical space with an open-footed stance that makes them firmer on the platform but so much like immobile geese or ballerinas in tutus. At the end of the day, outside of that small space there are not many other possibilities: the objects that we will carry with us will be contained in a backpack on our shoulders. Any object that occupies the vertical space will be welcome, any object that crosses it horizontally will be hindered.

“I know my age, I can tell, but I don’t think so.”
Marc Augé

“Recommended maximum age 50 years”.
From the Xiaomi Mi scooter manual

Old age illuminates in our eyes the many dangers of existence: we live – all of us who are no longer twenty years old or who are “a certain age” – in the more or less conscious expectation of an imminent catastrophe, our own. And it is a concern that we will gladly extend to others. In this attitude of senile caution, which seems so wise to us and which will seem so irritating to young people, part of the many criticisms that the adoption of scooters have unleashed in the media is explained. The opinions are usually of people of a certain age like me, very suitable to cover a vertical object like a scooter with the veil of their fears. Those same people will look more condescendingly and less attentively at new bikes that help us ride better. After all, they look like bicycles, they look like him in every way, even though, in fact, they no longer are.

I observe a theatrical scene in the rotunda in the center of this coastal town. An elderly man, well over a certain age, wearing shorts, flip-flops and a youth T-shirt, opens the back doors of his Tesla. The small electrical ceremony attracts the eyes of passersby. The car doors open upwards, like gull wings, with a symmetrical and harmonious movement. At that moment the man, as we all watch, pulls a folded skateboard out of the back seat, spreads it out to occupy his own space, and while the car doors are still closing, he drives away on the little velocipede.

It is a scene full of technological fascination. I who love useless details, on the way home, I wonder what a Tesla will do parked in the middle of the pedestrian zone. Perhaps – I believe – electric cars, like any similar means of transport, enjoy a kind of extraterritoriality: for now, they have the magic necessary to access any place.

A relevant “object” that ties together many of the newer technologies we use to move around is silence. My neighbor, a very old lady who walks with some difficulty but dresses elegantly, has a busy social life and wears a beautiful protective visor while mowing the garden, drives a large white hybrid Toyota every day. . The car goes in and out of the front garden in absolute silence. For a few months I have seen her leave or park, always wrapped in the same silence. And every time I am moved to see that absence of noise, as could only happen to someone like me, after decades of horrible noises from internal combustion engines.

Scooters and pedal-assisted bikes are quiet, you don’t even hear electric cars much, just a deliberate whistle, and this, I had to say, strikes me as a very understated technological achievement. Silence will be useful to us: reading and thinking, whispering to loved ones, observing the great and small sounds of the world, which still exist and in any case speak to us. To get out of the horrible noise – as Lucio Dalla would say – and play the piano.

We also distrust scooters for another reason: because in a country of the elderly they are a countercyclical technology. As such, they move the world from where it could be to where it really is. In short, they speak of us and define us.

In a country of the elderly, the scooter and its adoption dynamics will have the impertinence of a slap. It’s an object that has the power to drastically separate the population into the can and the can’t, despite my old friend Tesla and those like him admirably determined not to give in.

Vertical space cannot belong to everyone and a technology that for physical reasons cannot belong to everyone will inevitably be vilified and ridiculed by non-beneficiaries. And this will happen, it must be said, for some understandable reason.

However, all of us, even those of a certain age, would be willing to adapt, at least as long as we have energy left. Even the smartphone, after all, was a countercyclical technology: despite this, it was able to overcome many of our obstacles. However, the vertical space of scooters imposes more rigorous limitations than those of a very small screen where it is difficult to read and where, when you touch something by mistake, everything flips.

Guido Ceronetti, years ago, of cell phones in the hands of the elderly said:

Even smartphones, like scooters, beyond a certain age, maneuver themselves.

On smartphones, in order not to be dragged into the Paris of the sewers, the trained eye and the precision of the fingertip will be of the utmost importance; on scooters the ability to balance, reflexes, opposition to the cruel force of gravity will dominate. It will be enough to observe how younger scooters handle scooters compared to older ones to realize how important these characteristics are.

The youngest sailors, avoiding the holes and the asphalt raised by the roots of the trees, tracing wide paths. The relationships with other similar technologies will be very evident: the scooter is a surf without waves, a self-propelled skateboard, a snowboard without snow. Same movements, same feeling of freedom and improvisation, a great Wednesday that has come to us effortlessly.

Everyone else, not so young, will ride their scooters in a linear trajectory, cautious, satisfied, but with a slight sense of anxiety in their eyes. The price to pay, beyond a certain age, for countercyclical technologies.

For all this, for the vertical space, for the demographic distinction that becomes a contrast between generations, for its approach, like many other electrical technologies, the issue of silence, scooters are today a landmark. They live in limited space, they constantly raise doubts about their safety, they challenge the civil registry of each one of us, inviting the society of people to take sides. Small revolutionary objects that will live the time of a summer or will last forever.

Meanwhile, whatever happens, from this terrace of a house from which I am about to leave, it seems to me that the only certain thing is that, at least for a while, these thin machines with very small wheels will continue saying things about us .