Scooters, With Reasonable Parts Supply

The motor scooter, and the automatic transmission that makes it work, has been around since 1925. The scooter with a manual tranmission, a moped, even longer. Modern scooters mostly have their engine attached to the swing arm of the rear wheel, adding weight to the wheel and making the ride bumpy. This gets commented on by commuters who actually use them. The most common users of motor scooters come in two varieties:

1. Rich people
2. People who lost their license from a DUI

These kinds of people are usually not the same. In most states, a 49cc scooter does not count as a motor vehicle so you don't need a license, registration, or insurance to ride them. You buy it out of pocket and just ride it, usually to work. Its a vehicle of humiliation in most states, especially The South, where they're the best possible warning advertisement against drunk driving.

It is important to remember that this is not going to be the case for much longer. In 2014, Obamacare seems to be very expensive and will remove the sort of income that would pay for a car, leaving barely anything to live on for the average person, even one with a fresh college degree. Poverty is the New Economy thanks to the last 6 years of bad economic policy and printing money like it was going out of style. The New Poor, who were so hopeful when they entered college a few years ago, can't afford cars. Scooters are their future. 

Cheap Chinese Scooters are around $500-900, sometimes more, and are built as cheap as they can be. Like bicycles, the parts are of various quality and like bicycles, the secret to riding a scooter is both picking the route and keeping it running. Scooters are made to be fixable by any shade tree mechanic and those are everywhere. If you want a low paying occupation, that's one. Right now scooter mechanics only work on expensive scooters owned by rich people who buy Vespas with full warranty so they get paid real money to fix them. This won't always be true. Someday we'll run out of oil enough to make that impossible to sustain and the cheap scooters will be the dominant ones on the road. The ones that break and have no warranty and fixing them is a $5/job proposition. After all, a new scooter engine from China is literally $35 on Ebay. If you burn up the engine, buy another one. Many poor scooterists do exactly that. They also buy a 49cc model and swap the engine for a bigger one, hoping they won't be stopped by a cop and checked. And they mostly aren't. There are even companies that will drop-ship you a crate with a scooter in it for $600. You'll notice I don't have one. There's a good reason. Most of these will only last a couple hundred miles before something fails and you can't get parts unless you know what's the same. And China isn't great about documenting stuff. Its a $600 scooter, not a marriage. 

On the flatlands 49cc is enough to get around and enjoy 100 mpg. Many riders commute on a few cups of gasoline a month. There's no gas gauge because: "why bother?". That kind of fuel economy is better checked by pulling the filler cap. Most modern scooters have a hook to hold the handles of your plastic shopping bag and a storage space under the seat to park your helmet so you don't have to carry it around with your shopping. They're practical, if the engine can pull the hill and you're flexible about what route to take. Around here you need 125cc engine rather than 49cc, and while two-stroke is the way to get a 49cc's power, in California that's likely to get banned at any time so I consider it a bad investment. Get a 4-stroke of sufficient size to stay legal long term and pull the hills you may find yourself on someday. At least in California, anyway. 

A recent travel photo in Saigon showed a broad line of modern scooter commuters and a few cars at a stoplight. Most were on big wheel scooters with multiple headlights. Modern and effective and able to deal with crappy roads rather than tiny wheeled and vintage looking Vespas not suited to suburban or rural roads in the real world. 

These sorts would be popular in the USA now, considering the economy, except the industry is still pricing them thousands too much. You can buy a lot of gasoline for $3K name brand scooter (Honda, Yamaha, Piaggio), and your car keeps the rain off. You don't have to worry about driveway gravel spilled across the road, and you are safe. You're also big enough not to be last described as "I didn't see him. He came out of nowhere" in the manslaughter trial of the driver that killed you. Human perception is used to big objects like cars and SUVs. Not people on scooters moving faster than a bicycle. To a car, a bicycle is a pedestrian. A scooter looks like a bicycle, so drivers perceive them as pedestrians, then at the last second, probably too late, realize they're moving too fast or misjudged the distance and have pulled out in front of the scooter and maybe get nailed broadside. This a common crash type. Really common. The scooterist should have been nailing the brakes early so the inevitable pull-out was merely rude rather than injurious or fatal. 

The exchange of risk for fuel economy should be a bit more advantageous, and scooters should cost a lot less, like they do in China or Japan: dirt cheap. And this would be possible if the Cheap Chinese Scooters had a better parts database and local parts were sold at Automotive chain stores. If your local Napa auto parts had scooter brake pads in stock, suddenly they become viable transportation. If AutoZone carried upgraded alternators which can run your GPS and a better headlight? Great. If you can be prepackaged universal LED turn signal kits? Great. This is why I think American should have some scooter brands built here, with proper parts available in common car stores rather than "dealer network" because car stores are everywhere and dealers are a hundred miles away. Its not transportation if you can't fix it. Considering that 100 mpg is the future since we don't have magic car batteries from the Jetsons, a parts network is needed. 

So imagine you can buy a scooter from a car parts store or hardware store or motorcycle lot and fix it with over the counter parts from your local auto parts store. Great. You can get tires there too, and they'll mount them cheap, just like any other tire. Now you've got common cheap efficient transport that's miserable in the rain, but beats walking or pedaling right? Now you've got some people in fashion who want to sell you safety clothes which are comfy to work in and look nice. 

A scooter is really for the barista who needs to putter down to the coffee shop at 3:30 AM and open the place up for the early crowd while she gets her legal assistant degree in college. For the young nursing assistant saving for the full degree costs of medical school and worried that Obamacare will destroy nursing wages so is saving to avoid student loan debt, just in case. For the burger flipper who missed too many exams and flunked out of high school so this is the best job they can get. For the web designer who can't afford a real car and mostly works from home anyway, just needs to get groceries and meet with their contract employers from time to time. 

Scooters are a sign of poverty yes. I'm not denying that. But they're also freedom to get around and not be trapped in a world where you can only work where you can walk, or where public transit goes, and when. Sometimes public transit stops are in bad areas after dark, or don't run often enough. A scooter avoids the issue, allowing point to point transit on your own schedule. Not great in the rain, but better than being a victim at a bus stop in a bad neighborhood. 

What should a scooter cost? A basic Chinese crate scooter is $500-700. This is fair. It just needs full parts support to keep running. A knowledge base of what parts fit what scooter should be in every auto parts chain store: Kragen, AutoZone, NAPA, PepBoys, etc. You might need to bring the part with you to verify it, but have it available. 

A better 125cc scooter, as sold in Italy, Taiwan, and Japan also needs part support, but their prices need to drop from $3500 to a more sane $2000. The parts to build them are cheap, and $1300 markup for a bigger engine and only slightly better brakes? That's profiteering. If these sold for $1500 they'd sell a lot of them. Scooters need to be ubiquitous to help offset the New Poverty caused by Obamacare costs. I wish I was joking about that. Not so much. 

Off the shelf upgrades to scooters will allow the emergence of creature comforts: heated seat and grips, a windshield, better tires, upgraded brakes and suspension to improve ride smoothness and speed, larger engine, brighter lights, all sorts of stuff to make them a little better, when money allows. I see us drifting into the Greater Depression in a fairly permanent sense. With no magic electric car battery and fossil fuels will run out, costs of transportation are going to be high, and building renewable infrastructure expensive, to say the least. Electric trams are not cheap, even running from thousands of solar panels. We're going to need scooters during the transition. We'll need them and need to get used to them. We need to admit our poverty and accept the consequences. And deal with it. 

Once I have a job, I'm getting my motorcycle license. Then I'm going to put some money into this and get my own answer working. It will probably not be a scooter, thanks to the crappy roads here, more likely a used Enduro motorcycle, but I will deal with it all and report my discoveries. Around here we've got hills like San Francisco and engine braking is a very good idea.