In this article we detail the New Zealand example of how Sal's Pizza discovered just how useful the Segway PT is for urban food deliveries, as restaurants announce plans to use e-scooters to deliver meals when the country moves to Alert Level 3. Restaurants and cafes throughout the country are poised to begin selling and delivering food from Tuesday 28 April 2020, when New Zealand moves from Covid-19 Alert Level 4 to Alert Level 3. Deliveries must be contact-less, meaning the customer must order and pay in advance, then arrange to pick up or have the food dropped off without coming within 2m of another person. Because retail shop doors need to remain closed to the public, neither in-person ordering before taking away, nor in-store sit-down dining is permitted until Alert Level 2. There have been news reports earlier this week about a backlash against delivery incumbent Uber Eats. Restaurants and cafes are complaining about Uber's 30% to 35% cut of the gross sale - and Uber's refusal to consider dropping their margin during these corona-days. Unsurprisingly, entrepreneurial-minded Kiwi businesses have been masterminding alternatives. These include a group of 15 restaurants in Wellington banding together to cooperate around arranging their own deliveries. Kiwi sharing scooter pioneers Flamingo have announced a delivery service using Segway e-scooters. Flamingo have already hired 100 riders, and are interviewing 500 more. This will be the first time since the beginning of Alert Level 4 that ride sharing scooters have been seen on the streets. Operators including Lime, Wave, Beam, Neuron - and Jump by Uber - have had to temporarily shut down for the past month. Before you read on, here's a specially curated list of The Great New Zealand Restaurants that have pivoted to providing takeaways from Tuesday, according to The Spinoff. Meanwhile, an Auckland-centric list has been published by Stuff. According to an article in Stuff at least some of Auckland's restaurants in the list above will be e-delivering using Flamingo's e-scooters (presumably along with many other):

Auckland-based chef and restaurateur Sid Sahrawat said he and his wife and business partner Chand had been creating takeaway menus for their three restaurants, Sidart, Cassia and Sid at The French Cafe.

Modern Indian restaurant Cassia would offer 10-12 of its signature dishes, such as tandoori chicken with bhuna spices, while The French Cafe would offer five classic dishes like coq au vin and duck l'orange. Fine-dining restaurant Sidart, which was named Restaurant of the Year in the 2019 Cuisine Good Food Awards, would also have five options.

Sahrawat said front of house staff would be redeployed as delivery staff, using Flamingo scooters to do short distance deliveries. Some customers could even expect a delivery from the award-winning chef himself.

"Both Chand and I might be delivering to some of our guests in our cars for those guests that are slightly further away."

This has all happened before. Just swap 'Covid-19' for 'the GFC' and 'e-scooters' for 'Segway Personal Transporters' and take a journey back to a time when crises wasn't as serious, and the delivery solution du jour was actually better. Sal's Pizza began delivering hot pizza on Segway PTs out of their very first store in 2009. They open up shop in Commerce Street in Auckland's CBD during the middle of the Global Financial Crisis. Launching in August, they began a door-to-door service using a pair of Segway PTs during that winter of our discontent. They proved that even the depths of a recession can be a great time to start a business if you've got:

• a great idea - New Zealand had never had an authentic New York-style pizza joint before
• a point of difference - Segway PTs!

The use of Segway PTs really put Sal's Pizza on the fast-food map of downtown Auckland. Corporate customers were delighted at the super-quick delivery times, and customers were intrigued to get what was often their first-ever close-up look at a self-balancing device. One of the often underestimated yet really big benefits of the Segway PT is revealed when doing deliveries: ride the Segway PT in through the front door of the tower block, straight into the lift (elevator) and up to an office's front desk or apartment door without dismounting. Then turn on the spot, retrace your path, and on to do the next delivery without delay. Sal's quickly expanded to two stores - downtown and K'Rd - and four Segway PTs. Soon, the K'Rd store required three PTs to address its broader coverage and extended inner-suburban reach. And just how cool the futuristic the zero-emission Segway PT looked as it zoomed around 100 year old neighbourhoods delivering a unique taste of New York to Auckland city-dwellers. And remember - absolutely nowhere else in the Southern Hemisphere was food delivery by Segway PT happening. Not in any country in South America, not in a single city in Australia, not in any town in South Africa (nor any village elsewhere on that continent). This was New Zealand pioneering the way again. Sal's Pizza soon opened a joint midway up Queen Street, one in Takapuna, then Parnell. It wasn't long before half a dozen Segway PTs (and an early e-bike) were clocking up tens of thousands of kilometres delivering pizza to hungry Auckland mouths. Our Sal's pizza-eating competition story notes seven stores opened by early 2014, including one in Hamilton. Since then, this business has kept growning with a mix of boot-strapping and franchising. Today, there are at 33 Sal's Pizza stores nationwide. Successful businesses attract competition, and it wasn't long before the first California Burrito outlet opened up right next door to the original Sal's, got themselves a couple of Segway PTs to do deliveries, then opened more stores (including right next to Sal's mid-Queen Street joint). This was just about the same time as the first copy-cat manufacturers of Segway PTs started arriving on our shores, but of course every single such contraption was just a dangerous, non-redundant pile of rubbish. Nobody ever dared try delivering anything on them (nor doing actual real work of any kind), and anyone who wasted their money buying them quickly (re)learned a certain age-old lesson. Elsewhere on Auckland's streets the Segway PT had become well-recognised and highly regarded via the spectacularly successful Heart of the City 'street ambassadors' who rode around the CBD assisting tourists while clocking up 6,000 incident-free kilometres in just 18 months. Cornwall Park followed suite from 2010, extending response capability by adding a Segway Patroller to provide a helping hand to summer visitors. Alas, one day an over-zealous police officer spoilt all the fun. Despite the fact that the matter of whether or not a Segway PT was a 'mobility device' as defined under the Land Transport Act was on appeal before the courts, Sal's bowed to good grace and a desire to avoid a damaging bash-up in the sensationalist news media, so temporarily retired their delivery fleet. Eventually the courts determined a Segway PT was indeed a 'mobility device' and thus permitted to be used on footpaths (and roads) - including for food deliveries and patrols. Looking back at this from 2020, it all seems so quaint - with e-scooters everywhere and the rules around personal transportation devices poised to be modernised. Think about it like this: the actual devices - bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, self-balancing transporters, skateboards, etc - have not changed in physical size or weight or performance compared with 20 years ago (and nor have the rider rules). But people's attitudes towards them have. Sure, battery packs are better and components are less expensive, but the dimensions, weights and speeds of these various devices remain unchanged. At last, the rules are set to be modernised. The future has arrived and pretty much everyone across the entire world agrees that personal electric transportation devices rightly belong on both footpaths (at restricted speeds) and on the roads, cycle lanes, cycles paths and shared paths. It has just taken many nations and states a little while to catch up with the temper of the times. And sure, there are some odd-man-out exceptions (for example, compare the sensible "rideable" rules in Queensland with absurdly restrictive New South Wales, or pretty-much-every-state-in-USA Segway/e-scooter/ECU rules with 1800-era UK rules). Today, the Sal's Pizza and California Burrito experiments stand as proof of the utility and efficiency of the Segway PT for urban food deliveries. Here's what we learned: SAFETY: Dozens of PTs ridden for tens of thousands of kilometres - and not one single reported incident - such as a collision with a person or an accident involving another vehicle. Not by a pizza delivery rider or a street ambassador or anyone else. Not one. EFFICIENCY: The Segway PT proved ideal for making deliveries faster and more cost-efficient in most - but not all - environments. Lets look into what Sal's Pizza learned in this regard in some more detail. Initially, deliveries out of Commerce Street were a spectacular success. But at Queen Street they was unnecessary due to the nature of the customer and the catchment area. At K'Rd, Parnell and Takapuna the Segway PTs endured as an ideal delivery vehicle. Ironically, a couple of years after launching at Commerce Street the environment altered and the Segway PT was no longer such a good fit. In fact no other vehicle worked out either - not a bike nor a scooter nor a car. What had happened was the pedestrian density tripled and progressed by any means was severely hampered, while traffic on the surrounding streets became gridlocked. Much had changed since the business had opened its doors on Commerce Street. Firstly, the Britomart train station and bus hub had opened, tripling the amount of foot traffic that spilled onto the footpaths. Roadworks had removed car parks, added temporary bus stops, and generally turned the streets into a slow moving nightmare. The purpose of the road works? To add bus lanes, cycle lanes and convert surrounding streets into Shared Spaces for pedestrians, cycles, cars, etc. Timely pizza delivery by Segway PT (or e-bike, bicycle, scooter or car) had become impossible, and what deliveries were offered were now being completed the old fashioned way - on foot. The delivery radius had to be scaled back to walking range. That said, the impact of this limitation on Sal's business was off-set somewhat by the launch of their new stores in mid-Queen Street, Parnell and North Wharf. At the same time, a massive jump in close-by customers arrived courtesy of numerous new apartment blocks opening up in the central CBD (together with commuters walking to and from the transit infrastructure). RELIABILITY: Segway PTs are commercial-grade devices with legendary build quality and reliability. For example, Segway Tour companies such as Queenstown's Segway On Q have been getting up to 30,000km out of their machines (that's like riding twice around the world...actually a little more). PRACTICALITY and CAPABILITY: By just about every measure a full-sized Segway Personal Transporter (PT) is superior to an e-scooter for the role of delivering food in an urban environment. Hot pizza, curries, gourmet restaurant meals (even wine!) can be safely carried upright on a stable, self-balancing Segway PT using side pannier bags, front cargo frames, custom mounts, or wearable back packs. With its large tyres absorbing the bumps, the Segway PT is quick and nimble. It can negotiate curbs with ease, safely cross slippery surfaces, and climb the steepest hills. Only a Segway PT can come to stop in an instant, and turn on a dime. A Segway PT's footprint is no wider than an adult's shoulders, nor longer than an adult's walking gait. It is equally agile and well-controlled at all speeds - including while the rider is at rest. The Segway PT was designed from the ground up to manoeuver in tight pedestrian spaces, and is equally at home moving at speed alongside traffic and across open spaces. Compare that list of attributes with an e-scooter: small wheels, unable to climb curbs, tyres lack the surface area to keep traction on slippery surfaces, stability and braking force are rather limited, turning circle is enormous, and then there is the difficulty climbing the hills that many New Zealand towns are built on.... An e-scooter footprint is equally as wide as the shoulders of the adult who is riding it, but its length is three to four times longer than a Segway PT; agility is lacking at low speeds, and with small wheels stability is reduced at higher speeds on uneven surfaces (especially if the rider has a pizza-sized backpack swinging about). But of course we've known all of this for decade or two. The laws of physics don't change, but sometimes it does take a little time (or a crisis) for a good idea to catch on. Segway PTs are ready and available to rent on a weekly basis, and for outright purchase 0800 2 SEGWAY or email us segwaynz@icloud.com