When Bob Hedstrom, owner of Scooterville, handed me keys to a 50cc Kymco People scooter four years ago, my arthritic hips had me searching for summer transportation alternatives to a car or bike. With the ease of stepping onto a stool and a simple twist of the accelerator grip, I was off, and delighted — just like riding a bicycle, but downhill. All the time.

Thanks to Scooterville, perhaps, Bridgeland is buzzing with these elfin motorcycles. Hedstrom, based in Seward since 2007, estimates he has sold more than 1,000 scooters to Bridgeland residents over the last few years.

The birth of Scooterville

In 2002, Hedstrom was infected with the scooting bug by a well-meaning instigator, an older artist friend who had a vintage Vespa scooter and kept at Hedstrom daily to get one himself.

Ten years ago, however, there weren’t really any new scooter stores. Hardly anyone was making them, and the Vespas weren’t allowed into the country due to air quality regulations. Finally, Hedstrom found a 1980 Vespa in the back of a BMW repair shop in St. Louis Park that did vintage scooter repair and some sales. After taking out the extra life insurance his wife required, he took a ride that changed his life.

Soon he noticed new models from India and Asia hitting the market and Hedstrom started seeing more future in scooters than his then-business of building sets for a fading Minnesota movie-making scene. In 2002, he transformed that business into the set of a classic motorcycle shop called Scooterville.

Originally located in a warehouse north of University Avenue near the University of Minnesota campus, Scooterville puttered along for a couple of years. Things started looking up when the U decided to build a football stadium across the road. Suddenly, visions of visibility danced in Hedstrom’s head. Unfortunately, bigger money saw the same thing, and Hedstrom’s was given six months to, well, scoot.

Fortunately, Hedstrom had been eying the vacant former motorcycle shop on the corner of Cedar and Franklin avenues, near I-94. Though he gets that “how-in-the-heck-did-I-pull-that-off -in-six-months” glaze in his eyes, Hedstrom couldn’t be happier with the move. Fueled by the rising price of gas and the new location — all those folk stuck on traffic on the freeway able to see his sign — scooter sales doubled this year, and he was basically sold-out by the end of June.

The scooter, then and now

Scooters — defined by their “step-through” design — came of age when the Italian aeronautic company Piaggio — forced after WWII to find something less threatening to make than helicopters — gave the Cushman scooters that American GIs were riding an Italian make-over. The resulting motorbike was light, easy to ride, and protected a rider’s attire (especially skirts) from road spray. The owner of Piaggio initially thought they looked like a wasp, which he pronounced “vespa.”

Nowadays, there are several types of scooters. Some go as fast as highway motorcycles, others putter along under 30 mph. Generally, the ones with engines under 50cc can be licensed as mopeds, which you can ride with just a regular drivers license. Otherwise you will need a motorcycle endorsement on your license.

A typical scooter and accessories will cost in the neighborhood of $2,000–$3,500, with running costs at one-fourth of an automobile’s — about $.10 per mile. If you are trying to justify purchasing it for something other than the fun of it, you may start breaking even after about 10,000 miles, which takes a while in Minnesota.

Sins of emission

Unfortunately, the environmental impact of scooters using internal combustion engines is a bit problematic. On the plus side, scooters are attractive in an urban environment in terms of decreasing congestion and wear on roads and parking, and they takes less resources to manufacture. The approximately 90 miles-per-gallon fuel economy means much less energy is used to haul a person or two around. According to John Seltz in the Minnesota Polution Control Agency’s Air Policy Unit, “If you are looking at CO2 emissions related to climate, emissions are pretty much proportional to gas mileage. So in this way scooters are better.”

The problem is scooters emit more hydrocarbons than cars. Lots more. Scooters using 2- or 4-stroke internal combustion engines are in the same family as motorcycles, snowmobiles, ATVs, jet skis, outboard boat motors and riding lawn mowers. Unlike automobiles, vehicles in this class do not have present day systems to contain evaporation of raw gas, fuel injection systems to burn gas more efficiently, and catalytic converters to burn anything left over. The models using two-stroke engines (for which oil is mixed in with the gas to provide engine lubrication) are especially prone to spitting out particulates.

In 2006, the Environmental Protection Agency updated its 1978 emission standards to reduce harmful emissions by half, but it is still twenty-some times that of passenger vehicles. (EPA Finalizes Emission Standards for New Highway Motorcycles.) To stay up-to-date with the worldwide attention motorcycle emissions are receiving, check out this link to the EPA’s site. According to Seltz, “If scooters continue to make up a larger and larger portion of the total fleet, EPA may need to ratchet down the existing standards, perhaps requiring catalytic converters, which would be the next step.” In Italy, the government has created a 300-euro incentive to trade in old two-stroke models for new ones.

Environmentally conscious buyers will want to avoid cheap, two-stroke engine scooters and pre-2005 models. Models with catalytic converters are starting to enter the market, and of course there are electric models — though your recharging source could be burning coal.

Ride safely

The July 15 death of Tommy Earl White on Southeast University Avenue underscores the fact that scooter riding can be dangerous. Like a bicyclist, a scooter rider is virtually unprotected on the road, and as scooter folk are more likely to run with the cars, it can be more dangerous than bicycling.

While that may be part of the “born-to-be-kind-of-wild” thrill that scooter riders love, you should scoot with a Spidey sense of danger. Keep your headlight on, be extra defensive and courteous (leave your inner-Ninja at home), be noticeable, avoid riding in blind spots, watch intersections and make eye contact with drivers waiting at them.

And dress appropriately. “I just want to scream when I see people riding in thongs [the footwear kind],” said Hedstrom. Cover the parts of your body you really like; goggles or glasses is the only mandatory wear, but a good helmet is a must if you don’t want people tsk-tsking over the time you lost your brain.

I found having a mobile phone in my hip pocket was handy when I took a corner too fast, skidded on a patch of sand and laid the bike down in apparently spectacular fashion in front of a group of people waiting for a bus. I was fine, but my phone, which took the brunt of the skid, got a bit cracked. The lesson: you might consider an assortment of hip pads and gloves and the advice above about non-aggressive scooting.

Like all things cool and out of the mainstream, there are clubs for scooters riders. They meet regularly through out the year and organize rallies.

A short list of clubs include The Regulars
and the Minnesota Maxi-Scooters.

Also, check out the amazing 22,000-mile peace scooter journey of Alix Bryan, who rode her scooter around the U.S. in the form of a peace sign. Bryan asked the same question of everyone she met: “What is your definition of peace?” Bryan completed her journey in August.

Dan Nordley is a Cooper resident and owner of Seward—based Triangle Park Creative, which publishes The Bridge newspaper.

last revised: December 1, 2008

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