I had to bail off my motorcycle when I was 23. A truck crossed the center line and I took a header into the ditch. Broke two ribs and cracked my collarbone. No way was I going to hit that semi head on. I’ll take that grassy ditch every time.
Jumping off a Segway is a lot easier than ditching a motorcycle. You wouldn’t even hurt yourself (badly) getting off a Segway.
I think you’ve got it right, though - this fellow probably thought, up to the moment he went over, that he was just about to get the Segway back under control.
Panic, very possibly. People don’t always think straight in stressful situations. Even people who are normally very smart can do dumb things out of panic.
Its not even really about panic. Intelligent people need ample time to make intelligent decisions. The human brain isn’t wired to instantly know the correct response for a given situation. When the allotted time to react becomes shorter than what the nervous system can actually handle, people essential are on autopilot. Their movements become guided by reflex arcs which exclude the cerebral cortex, and thus rational decisions, entirely. Examples of such reflex arcs include raising your hands to break a fall, or jerking your head away from a fast incoming object. That reaction is called the tectospinal reflex. Here is a description:
You might say, “But he must have had a good 5 to 10 seconds to jump off that segway once he realized he was heading towards the cliff!” That is true, but 5 to 10 seconds can be a much shorter period of time than armchair analysts would tend to believe. When attempting a complex motor task such as stopping a segway, you have to coordinate a large number of minute motor tasks with a huge array of incoming sensory information. To the brain, this can seem like a constant barrage of stimulus-reaction arcs which essentially prevent you from considering what is happening, evaluating possible outcomes, devising a plan of action, and implementing that plan of action. That’s basically a long winded way of saying “It all happened so fast”.
Its for those reasons that I never blame anyone for failing a task which takes place over an extremely short period of time. Only problems that could have been avoided through foresight can be critiqued. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have driven a segway so close to a cliff at all.
Complicating this issue is the fact that reaction time is the first thing to go in older people. In real life, people are not nearly as coordinated as we would like to believe.
And if you had broken your neck instead, there’d be some judgmental tool on a website wondering why you hadn’t done something else. You weren’t there, haven’t seen the site of the accident, and have no idea what the circumstances were. Yet you feel compelled to use the term “idiot” freely. Nice.
I rented one of those Segways in DC and you get very confident on those things very quickly. After half an hour we were in front of the White House where the area was closed off and the street was wide open (not too many people protesting that day) so I took off flying on the thing; doing figure 8’s and weaving in and out of pedestrians. That is until I fell off the damn thing by trying too tight of a turn; the tour guide just shook her head as to say another idiot on a Segway. I got up and started right back up again, still not scared or respectful of the thing; good thing there were no cliffs on our tour route. :eek:
I rode one of them things on a tour. You can get up quite a speed on them. I did, then I started hitting some potholes on the sidewalk. It was all I could do to hang on, never mind slowing down. I didn’t fall, but it was a close thing and I was scared. Lucky there’s no cliffs in Chicago, but I can sure understand what happened to that poor guy. Bailing from a fast moving vehicle for someone in their sixties would be just as terrifying as holding on for dear life.
According to our local newspaper, the trail he was riding along was dangerously narrow and ran alongside the cliff in places, coming very, very close to the edge. Why does everyone assume he drove straight up to the edge of the cliff and had plenty of time to jump off? Sedgeways are widely viewed as a lazy person’s method of transportation, therefore he probably saw the edge coming but was just too damn lazy to jump off? Is that really what most people think is the most likely explanation?
Sounds like he was in it for the adrenaline rush. I have done similar things but he just didn’t get the desired result. Sometimes money makes it easier to look for more dangerous thrills.
It’s like your driving fast weaving in and out of cars and feeling the rush until some old lady pulls out in front of you. Or in my case it was a semi. I locked up the brakes and came within a few feet of hitting the semi sideways. I exchanged looks with the driver and he had this look on his face that said, “Deary, you almost bought the farm”.