Scooters: Very cheap miles

By Daniel Patrick Sheehan The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) - 06/30/2008

A 49cc motor scooter on display at at World of Honda-Yamaha. A scooter can get up to 110 miles per gallon of gas and you only need a drivers licence to drive one. AP Photo/Southeast Missourian, Fred Lynch

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — As surely as gas prices rise, on-the-go Americans will find ways to stay mobile.

Hence, scooters. Ubiquitous in Europe for decades, the little motorbikes are selling madly stateside, with sales up 24 percent over last year. Prices range from $800 for no-name imports to $8,000 for the best-known brands, such as Vespa, but scooter fans say the machines pay for themselves before long.

“I filled it up with $5 yesterday,’’ said Dawud Hason, 48, standing beside the used scooter he bought from a friend last week so he could travel from his south Allentown, Pa., home to his center city barbershop without sucking the guts out of his household budget.

At some dealerships, scooters — capable of 60, 70 and even 100 miles per gallon — are selling at about the same pace gas stations change their price boards.

Well, maybe not that fast.

“I sold eight in the past two weeks,’’ Walt Rupnik, manager of the Pep Boys in Whitehall, Pa., said a couple of weeks ago as gas prices began their final push to the $4 threshold. “Once (gas) prices start going up, I start getting calls for scooters.’’

This week, with the $4 threshold already a footnote in gasoline history, nothing had changed. Rupnik on Wednesday sold a scooter before 10 a.m., this one to a cheerful retiree from Bethlehem, Pa., named Bill Lubrecht.

“The gas mileage is an added bonus,’’ said Lubrecht, who paid $1,100 for the Baja Motorsports scooter with its 125-cubic- centimeter engine and plans to use it “just for fun.’’

For a scooter that size, the operator needs a motorcycle license, which entails a trip to a PennDOT driver’s license center for testing. There’s no such requirement for smaller scooters — engines below 50 cc — in Pennsylvania.

Scooters are distinguished from motorcycles by various design elements, such as engine and tank placement, and smaller tires, typically 16 inches or smaller. Small scooters can travel about 40 mph. The largest can reach 120 mph — not that you’d ever go that fast, of course. Scooter insurance runs about $250 a year, according to the D.E. Cressman Insurance Agency in South Whitehall, Pa.

Scooter sales were up 24 percent in the first quarter of 2008, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, a trade group. Vespa USA, the American branch of the best-known scooter maker, said its sales in May were 105 percent higher than the same month last year.

Hason said he thought about buying a small car, but decided a scooter was a better bet.