On Scooters as a class of vehicle/tool
Article Table of Contents
Introduction #
Often when I say “scooter”, especially in the united states, the person thinks of something different than what I mean. Here’s a recent post from the Sportique Scooters instagram:
This is the kind of vehicle I’m talking about when I say “scooter”.
I once had a vehicle just like this photo. The helmet I used (and still use) is not as charming as this helmet, unforunately, but it is a bit safer, and I want the best head protection I can get. 1
There’s more to say about this kind of vehicle, and I’ve tried to, a few different ways. This page currently serves as “just” a jumping off point to other scooter-related resources.
Collections of writings about scooters #
See, it’s not really about scooters, per se. It’s the verb of the thing. Scooters are different than cars, but the only reason it matters at all is because scooter-ing is vastly different than car-ing.
And some of you might say “oh, I have a bicycle, and so…”
Scootering is also different than bicycle-ing.
👉 https://josh.works/scootering
My tiktok has lots of footage from/about scooting, but from a different perspective. [https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists]
I’ve ridden scooters in countries where almost everyone is actively riding scooters, and the people that don’t ride them expect the scooter users to be there anyway, and everything flows very smoothly and at an incredible number of vehicles-per-minute through given road segments.
I live in Denver, CO, and in my mind most likely that the reader of these ideas will most likely have grown up in the northern americas, where unless for some reason scooters are a part of you/your family’s life, it’s most likely you’ve never had much experience with the vehicle. Scooters are uniquitous in some parts of the world, so in some of these writings about scooters I’m trying to plug those concepts together. The scooter norms of some places combined with the car driving norms of the USA. 😬
Footnotes #
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I always wear a full-face helmet of the “modern” style. An integrated sun visor is ideal, along with a clear visor that can be completely closed. If you see some of my scooting videos you’ll have a sense of it. These kinds of helmets are the most protective, provide the most protection from wind and sunlight and noise. I also wear a disposable painters mask. It’s a heavy-duty N95 “Odor respirator”. obviously vehicle emissions include tail pipe emissions AND tire rubber microplastics AND metal dust from brakes, so there’s a lot in the air I want to keep out of my lungs.
Here’s what the internet has to say about these kinds of masks. Here’s what I last got off of Amazon. Once you try a nice mask like this, it might be hard to go back. Once I started getting choosy about masks, I started wearing them a lot.
An R95 Odor Respirator 8246 is essentially the same as an N95 respirator in terms of filtering 95% of airborne particles, but the key difference is that the R95 is designed to be somewhat resistant to oil-based particles, while a standard N95 is not, making the R95 a better choice for situations where oil mists or fumes might be present; both are NIOSH-approved respirators.