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This triangular parcel is one of several skate parks that San Francisco unveiled in an effort to pacify its thrasher subculture. The first, Crocker-Amazon Skate Park, opened in 2000. It was followed by Hilltop Skate Park in the Bayview (just a big cement dish, though it's slated for a remodel next year), Potrero del Sol in the Mission, Waller Street Skate Park in the Haight (a temporary installation that rankled neighbors), and Balboa Skate Park, which transformed a section of Mission Terrace parkland into a jigsaw puzzle of wood ramps and platforms. Each of these facilities is a multimillion-dollar olive branch from the city to its skaters, in the hope that they'll cause less trouble if they're kept inside a fence.
Many skateboarders embrace them; others are wary. To Watson, municipal parks strip away a key element of the '90s skate culture he remembers: that pack-hunter tradition of roaming the city in search of ledges, curbs, or scrapyards to commandeer. To city officials, they're a tool with which to domesticate an outlaw population.
To some nearby residents, they're a blight.
Wolfram Arnold helms the home owners association for a condo complex on Stevenson Street, just north of SOMA West. He says the sound of skateboard wheels rattling down the cobblestone street rousts his family at all hours of the night.
"The freeway, it's more of a 'whoosh,' just white noise," he says. "But these skateboards hit the pavement and they sound like gunshots." Not to mention that skaters pee on his front stoop and his garage, because SOMA West has no restrooms.
"We've just started calling the police," Arnold says. "But they're annoyed because they have other things to do."
He believes the axis of power has shifted in San Francisco: Skateboarders now have their own lobby at City Hall, and officials are so eager to pacify them that they'll overlook the concerns of business owners and residents. Cops don't issue tickets any more because they get thrown out in court.
It's a far cry from the days when Officer Squirrel besieged unsuspecting skaters by the Embarcadero. Yet Arnold also suggests that the new crop of skate parks has failed to resolve a long and acrimonious conflict.
Adding a motor might, in fact, be the only thing that shifts public perception.
Die-hard skaters like Thompson and Caulfield bristle when asked to opine on electric skateboards, and perhaps that's understandable. The new boards are, after all, intended for a more mainstream population. But they're also the end of an evolutionary line. Wood boards that were traditionally used for stunts led to longboards, which are really a form of suburban transit; their big wheels and long decks keep a rider from popping onto rails and grinding away at property. (In some cities, skateboard laws have exceptions for longboards, because they're not perceived as a bad element.) Those, in turn, begat the latest transformation, in which boards are converted into economical, ecologically friendly, self-powered vehicles.
In skateboarding, as in other things, cultural forces pivot in relation to technology. The sport was once dubbed a nuisance, and the city tried to push it out. Then it gained mainstream acceptance, and the city tried to make space for it. Now it's a viable form of transportation, and the city embraces it: Supervisor David Chiu tested one of the Boosted Boards in August, at a Hayes Valley neighborhood event sponsored by The Bold Italic. He rode wearing an immaculate suit and tie.
People who might revile the old wooden boards see these motorized things on the street and think, My, how far we've come.
Sanjay Dastoor had little interest in skateboarding before he helped conceive the idea for Boosted Boards with two other Stanford grad students in 2011. Co-founder Matt Tran had finished his master's degree in mechanical engineering and gone to work for Lockheed Martin; in his spare time Tran was trying to develop a "snowboard for the street" that operated as cleanly as a Segway electric two-wheeler, but didn't look as big and dorky. The other co-founder, John Ulmen, had purchased his first longboard during grad school. He used it to get around campus, but had a hard time pumping with one foot and balancing with the other while carrying all his things.
Dastoor was friends with both of them. He and Tran spent weekends snowboarding in Tahoe or riding motorcycles in the Palo Alto hills; after meeting Ulmen, they eagerly tackled his problem.
"We looked at everything that had a motor," Dastoor says, adding that the team found electric and gas-powered skateboards dating back to the 1950s and '60s, though most were bulky things with monster wheels and lead acid batteries in their motors. They decided to refine the idea and improve the form, adding brushless motors (which are controlled by a computer instead of by mechanical brushes, making them lighter and more precise), jaunty orange wheels, and bamboo decks with grip tape. They worked on the first two prototypes at night and during weekends, using their savings to buy materials from a local hobby airplane store. Tran was still at Lockheed Martin; Dastoor and Ulmen were still pursuing Ph.D.s. They'd ride early iterations of the board around campus and through downtown Palo Alto.
"People would chase us and say they wanted one," Dastoor recalls.
The following spring Boosted Boards was accepted to two startup incubators, Y Combinator in Mountain View and StartX at Stanford University. Dastoor and Ulmen decided to put their degrees on hold. They launched a Kickstarter campaign in the fall of 2012, with a video that showed young, preppy, flannel-shirted commuters hoisting the 4-pound boards onto their backpacks, sitting with them on Caltrain, and steering them up the steep hills of San Francisco or along the suburban boulevards of Palo Alto. They raised $467,167.
The idea was to serve a niche market of longboarders and tech junkies who fetishize elegant machinery. Carefully engineered, electric boards bear the same high-energy lithium-ion batteries that power smartphones, laptops, or electric vehicles. They're equipped with onboard sensors and processors. Their motors can glide up a hill at 20 mph. And, Dastoor says, they have the "dynamic" look and feel of a skateboard, because riders help steer by leaning from one side to the other.
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