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New Plymouth District Council & TSB Community Trust adopt Segway-Ninebot KickScooters

The progressive province of Taranaki has been adopting Segway-Ninebot KickScooters in leaps and bounds. NPDC and TSB Community Trust.jpg People getting about town on New Plymouth's streets can rent Blip sharing scooters, which use KickScooters powered by Segway - the same model that has been used by Flamingo, Wave, Beam and Jump by Uber elsewhere in New Zealand. Recently, staff at New Plymouth District Council were offered the ability to purchase a Ninebot by Segway KickScooter (ES2), a Legend e-Bike or Legend bicycle financed by the council, with repayments deducted from weekly pay packets over a period of time (say, 2 years). This scheme proved popular, and Segway New Zealand has delivered the first take-up of KickScooters under this scheme. Other organisations around the country are beginning to offer similar options to their staff as a way to encourage alternative transport options to and from work. The TSB Community Trust quickly saw how useful the Segway-Ninebot KickScooter was for New Plymouth District Council staff, and purchased their own to use to get between meetings around town. An e-scooter can make a multi-modal commute a viable alternative to a journey by car. For example: scoot the first mile to the bus stop, then take the bus, then scoot the last mile to work. Long before the popularity of Segway-Ninebot KickScooters, Segway was the first company to establish a viable electric "last mile" option with the release of the pioneering Segway Personal Transporter (PT) range in 2003. The smaller p-Series (p133 model) was the lightweight, self-balancing device that showed a (then-unwilling) world how battery powered personal transportation devices could make sense in a world already built out for pedestrians and motor vehicles. The Segway PT had been carefully designed to be safe to use in both kinds of spaces. Today, full-size and mini-sized self-balancing devices are joined by e-scooters to make "the last mile dream" a reality for a rapidly increasing number of commuters throughout New Zealand.