NZ Listener
17 November 2006
Alistair Bone
Rising traffic congestion and fuel costs mean the third age of scootering is upon us.
Andreas Vaioleti is staking it all on motor scooters, again. Once already, the 25-year-old has sold everything he owned, gone to Japan and brought back scoots to sell from his driveway. Last year was good, especially the three weeks at the end of winter when fuel prices went up just as the sunny weather arrived. He sold five in one week, and that sort of demand has given him the confidence to open a proper shop – Scootling – in central Auckland. It is probably a safe bet.
The Transport Registry Centre’s provisional figures for 2005 show that 5135 new mopeds – things under 60cc that are more than likely (the statistics don’t differentiate between types of vehicle), motor scooters – were registered last year. This is more than double the 2528 in 2004 and way up on the 783 new machines in 2000. Scooters officially include such monsters as the 638cc, $15,495 Burgman Executive. But it is the under 50cc class, easy-to-ride automatics for which no car licence is required, that are the growth area. The Ministry of Transport has 13,162 mopeds on their books, and reckons another 5000 or so unregistered examples are sitting in sheds waiting for repair or summer.
Vaioletti says that 60 to 70 percent of his buyers are men in their early twenties to mid-thirties who live in the inner suburbs. He says a third of buyers want freedom from waiting in traffic and looking for car parks, a third like the look, and a third are concerned about fuel costs. His most frugal bikes will deliver somewhere between 50 and 60 kilometres per litre.
At upmarket Scooter World, the demographic is a bit different. Owner Kevin Golding reckons his people also live centrally, but are generally 35 to 50-year-old men whose first vehicle is a flash European car. Mechanic Andrew Pierce says that kids aren’t into the top-of-the-range game. “Things have shifted from the way the scene was in the 60s. For the $4000 it costs to buy a Vespa, you can buy a pretty wicked hot Japanese car. The person who is concerned about how expensive petrol is won’t shell out five grand for a new Italian scoot. They will buy a Japanese or a Chinese scooter or a Minimoto [see box opposite].” Golding puts the big demand for scooters down to one main thing – congestion.
It is easy to go to the front at a red light and ride between lines of stalled cars. It’s called lane splitting, and saves untold minutes. But it is illegal, even if usually overlooked by police with better things to do. It is a sore point at Scooter World that an obvious answer to Auckland’s gridlock is being ignored by the powers that be. “You can only use the Auckland City Council bus lanes,” says Golding. “The other councils won’t allow it. And you can’t use them on the motorway. Which is just … really … why? Whenever a media organisation does one of those competitions to see which mode of transport will get you into Auckland quickest, they never use a scooter or motorbike. It is never factored in, in any respect. With government, it is the same thing. They say they need to sort out Auckland’s congestion problem. But there is never any encouragement for people to use commuter motorcycles.”
Why not just get a motorcycle proper then? The storage space on a scooter is one reason. Pierce takes his scooter on tours. “The amount of crap you can stick on them is mint! Tents, fishing rod, meals, primus, booze. You can’t do that on a motorbike.” Golding’s reason appeals more to the inner-city set. “With motorcycles, if you turn up somewhere and you say, ‘I’ve got my Z9 outside’, people are like, uhhh, whatever. But if you say ‘I came on my Vespa’, you don’t have to explain anything”.
Not to Richard Brands and Gary Kettless. Brands has ridden a scooter since 1962, Kettless since 1980. The two are the leading lights in the Magnetos Scooter Club, the country’s biggest. Brands was there in the first of the three ages of scootering – the Mod scene. In the 60s, the sharply dressed Mods decorated their scooters with as much chrome as would fit. In the “second coming” around 1980, Kettless and his “scooter boy” mates were wearing MA1 flight jackets, camo trousers and Doc Marten boots and making their scoots go fast. The third age of scootering is upon us and the pair haven’t defined it yet, apart from being a “mixed bag”, with some newbies picking up on the Mods’ music (the Jam, Northern Soul, the Kinks, etc) and some just riding.
But even with the surge in the number of riders, scooter fatalities aren’t common. The MOT crash stats don’t differentiate between scoots and other bikes, but a spokesman says that he suspects that scooter riders make up a small part of the road toll, possibly because they are mainly used over short distances. Brands rides motorbikes, too. He knows which are safer. “I’ll say straight out that a motorbike has way better handling than a scooter. But a modern motorbike is a .357 Magnum. A young guy can get on it and do 300kph, zero to 100 in three seconds. So it is like you are in an F16 and all those cars are like slow-moving bombers …”
Brands says that scooting is just a different trip. “When I am in a swarm of scoots, I get a hell of a good buzz. The comradeship, the feeling of them all around you. They are a much less serious vehicle than a motorcycle; they have a nice, happy persona. A day without riding, that’s a day wasted.”
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