It’s hard to imag­ine an elec­tric scoot­er in a Judy Gar­land love song. More to the point, the very flex­i­bil­i­ty of today’s ​“micro­mo­bil­i­ty” machines means that they fol­low rather than encour­age development.

I felt head­ed for a life­time of scratch­ing ​“94%, 94%, 94%” in tiny let­ters on the worn pages of a com­po­si­tion book.

Flirt­ing with dan­ger on the open road is as old as, well, motor­ing itself.

Ear­ly elec­tric cars per­formed bet­ter in cities than inter­nal com­bus­tion vehi­cles, but didn’t give rid­ers the same illu­sion of free­dom and mas­cu­line derring-do.

Uber and Lyft are upend­ing how we live by revers­ing a cen­tu­ry-long trend of ever-increas­ing auto­mo­bile depen­dence, with its atten­dant dead­en­ing sprawl, omnipresent dan­ger, and envi­ron­men­tal harm. Their rev­o­lu­tion will trans­form the $1.5 tril­lion busi­ness of sell­ing cars into a $10 tril­lion ​“mobil­i­ty as ser­vice” busi­ness, accord­ing to a report by Mor­gan Stan­ley (now the lead under­writer for the Uber IPO).