To e-scooter through the streets of Auckland in winter is to experience a freedom known only to those few souls who have floated in deep space, or to those rare enlightened seekers of truth who possess the secret name of God - it's a very good thing to e-scooter through the streets of Auckland in summer, and in autumn, but especially right now, in cold, hard winter, that season of denial and entrapment and, you know, lots of rain. There the e-scooters scoot, hissing on wet pavements to and fro, with a beauty that would have enraptured Michelangelo.
To e-scooter is to move with less effort and more grace than walking, riding a bike, driving a car, running, commanding a submarine, riding a horse, skipping, riding a mule, skiing the winter snows – the not-quite-infinite but certainly numerous possibilities of proceeding from A to B have reached a kind of zenith in the e-scooter, that little whizzing kite, that thin stick on wheels, that green barely-there footprint brought to you by some kind of electrical charge. In brushless DC motors, the permanent magnets are on the rotor, and the electromagnets are on the stator. A computer then charges the electromagnets in the stator to rotate the rotor a full 360-degrees. Something like that.
To e-scooter is to lord it over fools stuck in traffic, pedestrians wearing out their stupid hips, bicyclists who like nothing more than to shut down the Auckland Harbour Bridge and get all indignant at the slightest whiff of criticism – I was on a flight taxiing away from Blenheim airfield recently when the pilot hit the brakes hard and suddenly and screechingly, because a nesting pair of spur-winged plovers refused to budge from the runway. That would never happen to an e-scooter. The other day I scooted around a park with a public swimming pool closed for winter. It had filled with rainwater. A family of spur-winged plovers were drinking from the shallow end.
To e-scooter through the postcode of 1011, known to realtors as the most expensive suburb in New Zealand, where I live as the poorest resident in that haven of the six-figure annual bonus and seven-figure house price, is to perhaps not entirely lord it over the owners of some truly remarkable vehicles, like the guy who purrs up and down the street in a white 2022 McLaren 765LT (starts at $382,500) – it's got them doors like Knight Rider that open sideways with a little sigh of air, but I scooted past him the other day like a silent assassin, and I could tell from his face that he knew his car was nothing, just a pile of expensive junk. Much the same expression shone on the faces of the passengers of a stretch limo that I scooted past the other day. Well, I mean I sure they did have expression, it's just that I couldn't see through the black tinted glass, melting with winter rain.
To e-scooter is to either own or rent and, while I applaud the owners of e-scooters, the freedom of renting is parallel to the freedom of e-scooting itself – you have no responsibilities, and when you imagine no possessions then the world will live as one, etc. There are three e-scooter rental options in Auckland. At the bottom of the heap is the orange Neuron e-scooter, which looks like something the Wright Brothers built and discarded as an embarrassing heap of junk. The board is wide and fat, and the annoying voice of someone with an American accent is activated when you turn it on and off. "Have a nice day!" Oh shut up. The point of scooting is silence. The new range of Lime scooters, introduced at the start of winter, are worse than the old range of Limes. They move slow, the brushless DC motor or whatever the hell it is sets up a loud wheezing like it's dying, and an annoying piece of music is activated when you turn it on and off. Ugh. The top-of-the-range are the purple Beams. Goodness, they go fast. Nothing is activated when you turn them on and off. The board is so thin it's like – and this is the very essence of e-scooters, their joy and their oneness with the seasons - riding on air.
