TheScooterScoop

And it goes a little sumthin’ like this, hit it!

Ask Alicia Karr why, at age 56, she bought her first motor scooter, and her answer is succinct: “Al Gore and Europe.”

Even though gas prices have dropped a little bit, we still find a straggler article on the ‘ever increasing popularity’ of our favorite 2-wheeled transports. They “wrote-a-song-about-it-like-to-hear-it-here-it-go.”:

On a trip to Italy last fall, Karr, an artist from Radnor, Pa., fell in love with Scooter Culture: the men in business suits, the women in long skirts. Gore’s movie on the perils of carbon emissions, “An Inconvenient Truth,” sealed the deal.

And so Karr purchased a Vespa LX 250 in “aurora blue” – metallic sky blue. “The artist in me fell in love with that.”

Her intention was to use the Vespa for short trips and errands, instead of driving her SUV, thereby saving gas and fossil fuel while making a small contribution to the welfare of Planet Earth. (Ten days after she picked up her scooter, a tree fell on her Lexus SUV, totaling it.)

More and more Americans, tired of sharing their paychecks with Exxon and dealing with ricocheting oil prices, are adopting scooters as economical “second cars,” or as a practical vehicle to tool around the city.

Click the title link to get a .10 cent history lesson, a blurb on the growing market segment, a bit on saving gas money, scooter pricing and something about your grandparents riding nekkid at the next regional rally. That’s a lot to cram into one little tiny article! (luckily, no pictures)