The wrong word grates.
Whoever in the Central Park Conservancy decided that bicycles, scooters, skateboards, etc., are "WHEELED DEVICES" should do a face plant. Devices? This has to be a bleed-over from the omni-presence of screens. "Electronic devices." Maybe some kid who's been playing too many games was in charge of the signs.
I was curious whether these signs, in media savvy Manhattan, had sparked previous complaint. I can't be the first one to notice, can I?
The signs showed up three years ago, and while they were criticized at the time, it seems to be on aesthetic grounds, for being ugly or useless, and not for using the wrong word.
The usage "wheeled devices" does not seem localized to the East Coast. Here is the California State University at San Bernardino's "Wheeled Devices Policy."
Which makes me wonder. Could I, like so many who point out supposed mistakes, be myself wrong? If I had to define "device" without looking it up, I'd say a mechanism to achieve a purpose, a contraption designed to do something, a goal-oriented machine. A certain complication is implied: a can opener is a device. An axe is not (I would call that "an implement.") Add "electronic" and electronic devices are any small handheld piece of equipment. A cell phone. An iPad.
Let's check the experts. My Oxford English Dictionary focuses on devices as figurative invention: "1. The action of devising, contriving, or planning; the faculty of devising," taking its time to even allude to physical objects:. "6. Something devised or contrived for bringing about some end or result" but even then, its "an arrangement, plan, scheme, project, contrivance."
But language is plastic. Perhaps a newer definition would include Central Park's mountain bikes and rickshaws.
The first half dozen definitions on the online Merriam Webster focuses on schemes and techniques, with only definition f giving us: "a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function" giving the example of smartphones and tape recorders.
And language is plastic: bicycles are devices if people say they are. But other people are allowed to push against certain usages, and calling a skateboard a device is, to me, an affected, out-of-place legalism, like calling a criminal a "perpetrator." "Vehicle" is a fine word, from the Latin vehiculum, which conveys the sense of something being carried, making it better than device because it suggests the presence of a rider being conveyed somewhere.