Back when people were first introduced to the Segway personal transport, the web seemed to light up with criticism. No, it didn’t live up to the hype which was, probably more than anything, its biggest flaw; schadenfreude being enthusiastically and expertly practiced by those with expertise in nothing else. It was, however, a marvel of engineering.

Just after the unveiling, I recall, during one such web forum mud-flinging session, pointing out that the technology behind Dean Kamen’s balancing act could be used as a basis for a new kind of personal transport: a wirelessly-connected form of personal transportation which would permit strings of Segways (or something similar) to travel at a uniform speed and thus eliminate many of our current traffic problems. Such connectivity would allow these vehicular strings to manage seamless transitions for others joining with or separating from the larger whole. All that was required was for each unit to operate in a wireless, peer-to-peer traffic environment.

Well, it turns out that a piece of such a system may be in the works. Trendhunter has a post (Link) about German researchers working on a P2P information system for drivers. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but we have to start somewhere.