Commuting On An Electric Unicycle

Regardless of where you live, most of us use public transport, some drive, cycle or walk. A small group of people are using a personal mobility device like a scooter, or, indeed, an Electric Unicycle. This is what I would like to share with this post – my own experience of commuting on an EUC.

I learned about an Electric Unicycle for the first time at a business conference, when one of the speakers rolled out on a Ninebot One on stage. I’ve never seen anything like it before and although I was intrigued it wasn’t enough to prompt me to buy one.

Fast forward to about three years ago now, I was working in Bristol and one of my colleagues used a EUC to commute to work. Remembering seeing it before I thought that it’s a perfect opportunity to get a closer look so I did. I asked to have a go and eventually borrowed one of his three wheels to see if I wanted to order it for myself. It took me about three days, after which I was capable of riding independently for longer than 100 metres. Getting on was the hardest of it all. We were going out after work for me to learn to ride it and it wasn’t completely free from incident. I overpowered the wheel while offering to drag race my friend and fell on mу fourth day of riding. I broke my watch, scraped my new trainers, jeans and knees but it didn’t stop me from riding again the following day and ordering my very own EUC – an Inmotion V8.

Fast forward to now, I’ve done thousands of kms on my EUCs and have been happily commuting around the city on them happily ever-after. Furthermore, I’ve been able to borrow wheels when travelling and that has vastly brightened up my travelling and sight seeing experience. I taught a lot of my friends to ride too, including my wife.

So what is it like to commute on one? I am currently living in London and am having to weave through traffic and pedestrians daily. Preparation takes minutes – putting on my protective gear and out the door I go. I now get to places much faster than I did with public transport and in most cases faster than driving. More importantly, commuting is no longer a mundane routine! It’s something I look forward to! I can easily be gone for hours after leaving to get a loaf of bread… 

I get door to door and certainly don’t need to worry about parking. The wheels have trolley handles so wherever you go they follow. Be it a shop, public transport or your office, it looks like a suitcase and is super easy to wheel around. I charge the wheel overnight and it easily lasts me the day. I can do 100km on a single charge with two of my wheels and I’ve been to Brighton on one twice. Right from my house and to the beach! The journey took around 4.5 hours, including a short break for lunch. Riding is fun and addictive. The majority of peoples’ reactions I encounter are positive. Whenever I see a rider wizzing by I can’t help but notice how cool and futuristic standing on a single wheel and moving forward at speed looks! You can roll at snails pace or ride as fast as a car on it without batting an eye lid. It accelerates like a rocket and has good breaking ability so you can estimate your stopping distance when stop just when and where you need to.

Do I feel safe using it? In my riding career, I’ve had small accidents as I fell and scratched my knees and elbows. Once you learn the ins and outs of your machine and develop awareness for the environment you are a lot less likely to fall off. I’ve not had the machine fail on me while riding (a cut-off) but it’s fairly common with speed daemons. Now I feel like it’s as safe as driving a car is as natural as is walking. I don’t think about the wheel anymore, I just get on it and go. It takes quite a lot of attention and experience to become a good rider and even more to become a great one. Getting on it and going is fairly easy and you only start developing skills over time through riding. The roads in London are bad and you have wheels with suspension (like the KingSong S18 or the Inmotion V11) to tackle this problem. The city infrastructure is sadly quite poor and is not adapted to Personal Electric Vehicles but it doesn’t mean that we can’t use them! I can’t see myself living without a wheel now.