Two strokes and you're out

They might be small but you won't like them when they're angry. Ewan McDonald scoots around a couple of matters irritating two-wheeled commuters. 

Scooter riders - those annoying commuters who buzz past your car, snarled in early-morning traffic, or sneak to the front of the queue at the lights on their pesky little machines - claim they're being picked on. By the Government's clobbering machine. And by you, the car driver.
Let's be clear about who and what we mean. While they're most often called scooters, these powered pushbikes legally are "mopeds". The engine is under 50cc (technically, "power output of 2kW or under"), designed to go no faster than 50km/h. They don't need a warrant, though they must meet safety standards for lights, brakes and tyre tread. Riders can hold any NZ driver licence.
You need only drive past any university or high school campus, or downtown street corner, to see they've bred like Rabbits (except they don't make those anymore) over the past few years. Reasons: thousands of cheap Asian imports - a new moped costs less than $2000. When petrol is over $2 a litre, a moped costs less than $8 a week for the average commuter; they're nippy, can scoot along bus lanes; can, and are, parked almost anywhere. For free.
That's the good oil. Here comes the blue smoke.
The Government has whacked up the cost of registration and is bringing in a separate licence for moped riders. Transport Minister Steven Joyce insists these measures are about rider safety and recovering the ACC costs of road accidents.
Importers and rider groups suggest Mr Joyce is using his power-to-weight ratio (a contentious measure used to limit the size of bikes for novice riders) to raise revenue when fuel's over $2, fewer commuters drive cars to work, buses are greener and he's collecting less petrol tax.
In September, Mr Joyce announced tougher motorcycle licence tests. From 2012 moped riders would have to pass a written and physical handling test. They would not be allowed to carry passengers.
His rationale: "Motorcyclists are 20 times more at risk of being involved in a fatal or serious injury crash than car drivers per kilometre driven. With more new riders every day, these steps are vital to keep riders safe on the road."
It followed a bike-riders' backlash earlier in the year over proposed ACC levies, and a Government retreat. The levy was particularly harsh on moped riders and scooter advocates insist it was hidden.
As Wellington shop-owner Mark Hodson blogged, the Beehive announced that re-registering a moped would rise from $90 to $130 a year, but that cost turned out to be $170. First-time registration of mopeds increased from $130 to $210. The bills included an unannounced $40 for "driver safety education".
One moped rider emailed me, "I've been scooting for more than 30 years and the Government has never ever shown any interest in my welfare - or spent a cent on training me."
Hodson believes mopeds, which may not travel on motorways nor exceed 50km/h, shouldn't be included in the levy. A Cabinet paper on ACC levy rates confirms mopeds have high crash rates but are of "significantly lower risk when compared to large motorcycles".
Crash figures can mean whatever a statistician wants them to mean, but it's pretty clear mopeds are not involved in too many serious (or socially costly) accidents. Government agencies claim motorcycle-related deaths declined in the late 1990s but have increased 68 per cent since 2004, and say this coincides with a quadrupling of motorcycle registrations. Maths suggests biking might be safer.
The Government: "Despite motorcycles only making up approximately 3 per cent of the vehicle fleet, in 2009 they comprised almost 13 per cent of all road deaths and 19 per cent of all serious injuries."
But Mr Joyce's statement said: "Motorcyclists aged over 40 years have experienced the largest increase in deaths and injuries over the last decade. Anecdotal evidence suggests a contributing factor in this increase is people who hold valid licences returning to motorcycling after a long break with deteriorated riding skills."
Maybe it's those guys escaping their midlife crises on Harley Fat Boys who should be smacked around the helmet? And if they "hold valid licences" already, how is the Minister going to stop them looking for adventure and whatever comes their way?
Government statistics "show that in around 60 per cent of all recorded crashes the motorcyclist had some level of responsibility. Motorcyclists are more likely to be at fault in rural areas and other motorists are more likely to be at fault in urban areas."
The moped rider might zap down Symonds St on his or her Jazz or Today but is highly unlikely to be thrashing a scooter - limited to 50cc and 50 clicks - through the countryside.
At one of several specialist stores on Great North Rd, Andreas Vaioleti of Scootling has analysed official statistics involving mopeds and scooters. His research "found that a staggering 72 per cent of crashes involving another vehicle were the fault of the other vehicle. In 83 per cent of the time, the most common reason for the accident was the other motorist failing to look, give way or stop. Almost all the statistics Scootling gathered from the NZTA or Ministry of Transport confirmed that, in fact, these other drivers were at fault, not the scooter riders."
Concludes Vaioleti, "If other motorists are causing most accidents involving mopeds, and are driving the vehicles which inflict most damage in those accidents, then it is those motorists that must be targeted first to reduce the rate of accidents and injuries. Moped riders are being given some unfair blame for the accidents they are involved in."
He has also begun an online petition against the separate licence: "We see this as a complete waste of time and another one of the NZTA/Government's revenue-gathering, nonsense ideas. Given that we now know moped riders are not to blame for the majority of the car v moped accidents, car drivers must be the ones to change first."
"Blame the drivers, not the riders" is a common theme in two-wheeled accident research. The most lauded study is the MAIDS report over five European countries in 1999-2000. Like the earlier US Hurt Report, it finds "the largest number of powered two-wheeler accidents is due to a perception failure on the part of the other vehicle driver".
Or, to use the words that most motorists will utter as they get out of the car to talk to the bike rider on the tarmac, "Sorry, I just didn't see you."
Drivers might not notice the scooter rider beside them. But the riders know that the Transport Minister has them in his sights.
Get your motor running, head out in the bus lane

This is a story about the first time I fell in love. It was summer, of course, as it always is in these kinds of reminiscences, and the Beach Boys were playing on the tiny tinny blue transistor that Uncle Graham and Aunty Isobel had brought back from their trip to Japan. The Beach Boys, I mean, on the radio, not my uncle and auntie. Though I rather think that, during that summer, I preferred The Move.
And I was 14, and I have just cast my eye back over the first several sentences, and I, and you, will realise they sound like every other columnist with a large photo-byline sashaying around the pages of the Daily Eyestrain.
Especially the females, who are prone, if one may use that phrase, to giving many more specifics about their personal pasts than any of the reading public needs, wants or is vaguely interested in knowing, unless transfixed by mysterious codes on the sides of ready-meal containers.
It was my brother who introduced us. As it so often is, or certainly was when we grew up in Kilbirnie, a suburb of Wellington with a gene pool so small you could swim across it in 15 seconds and get a certificate from the headmaster.
I had fallen, head over heels, during PE class, for a girl who lived on the other side of Naughton Tce named Hazel. I was required to hold her ankles steady during a handstand, wearing serviceable cotton rompers. Again, for those who may be losing the thread, hers not mine.
As has become a repetitive stress injury throughout my love life, my feelings were not reciprocated. I would like to think that Martin, the brother ahead of me in the pecking order for getting your own bedroom in our sizable family, understood this pain. I'm sure he did, for I saw him explaining the situation in great details and with deep understanding to Hazel at St Jude's Youth Club on the next Friday night. I think there might have been a Move record playing.
On the very next day, Martin brought home my first love. Looking back, over the horizon of several decades, it was not love at first sight. She was not what you could call, in the lingua franca of those days, Wham Bam Thank-you Ma'am. She was rather more Cough Splutter Kick Gasp.
She was a faded red Puch motor-scooter. I think she came from Czechoslovakia. Or possibly Albania. I am not sure if she carried immigration papers; it is highly likely that the factory which produced her had disowned parentage, possibly around the time of the 15th piston replacement or somesuch other grindological procedure.
Martin taught me how to ride her, he taught me how to lean into corners, he taught me to use both the front and back brake at the same time, he taught me that thickly painted white lines on slippery city streets were not my friends, he taught me how to change gears, which (for those of you who have never had the opportunity to form a close relationship with a Puch scooter) may be only slightly less difficult than learning how to speak, or even read, Czechoslovakian. No wonder they divided the country.
Martin understood scooters. Martin understood all engines. While Dad glowered at his 1500-piece jigsaws on a tea-tray in front of the six o'clock news, Martin could take apart, clean, grease and re-assemble the innards of BSA, Matchless, AJS and Triumph motorbikes on the living-room carpet, and know which sprocket belonged to whatever chaindrive. Not a spark plug out of place, which is darned tricky upon a heavily patterned Bremworth. It was a great disappointment to me that Mum did not entirely appreciate his talents.
The Puch - she never had a name, I'm not familiar with Czech, let alone Slovakian, terms of endearment - came to an untimely end when I rear-ended a taxi outside the Basin Reserve. My attention was diverted because Tendulkar was batting inside the Basin at the time and I was desperate to read the scoreboard.
I would like to say the scooter evaporated in a puff of cheap two-stroke, but it was not the case. And for those unfamiliar with inner Wellington, it is a damned long push (or Puch) from the Basin to Naughton Tce. Mostly uphill. Once you've got through the Mt Vic Tunnel.
By then it was Nineteen-Something-Or-Other and I had more pressing needs. Not Hazel: School Cert and, more important, making the First XI for the national soccer tournament in Christchurch, but that's another ramble.
On and off through my life, I have remained faithful in my relationship with small and imperfectly engineered forms - though my partners answered to different names: Yamaha and Suzuki and Honda. For about 30 years, which is longer than any of my relationships (to date, I hasten to add). Just a couple of years back - okay, it might be six or seven, the mind plays tricks - I thought I'd kickstart the love affair.
I bought a gorgeous, dragonfly green, Italian-looking (I've always thought I was Italian-looking in a previous, or possibly future, life) retro-styled scooter. I called her Bella. I can't remember the brand and I'm sure the local agents don't want me to mention it here.
She was utterly Italian, in temperament and performance if not in DNA. She ranted. She raved. She coughed. She spluttered. She was Aida. Finally she died, operatically, on the hottest afternoon of that summer, at the bottom of the Bond St Overbridge, and I had to carry her corpse up to the hill-village of Arch Hill and commend her spirit to the undertakers in Newton Gully.
There were decisions to be made. Would I, despite a lifetime's seeming ineptitude at coping with a vehicle carrying more than two wheels, change my creed and embrace the four-wheeled faith? Or perhaps I should genuflect to the inevitable and pump up the tyres on the Warehouse velocipede hanging upon the garden fence?
I hinted about four paragraphs ago of my unfortunately recidivist tendencies regarding the marital state. Jude supplied the kind of answer that every middle-aged or thereabouts male wants to hear: "Well," she said, swirling the Doctors riesling about its glass in a suitably punctuative kind of way, "if you want to get another scooter, at your time of life, it's absolutely pointless me standing in your way."
Only 20 minutes later, which was about as long as it took my newly beloved to complete a neatly rounded observation on the Accident Compensation Act, 144 subclauses, the statistics of reaction times of mature gentlemen of riper years vis-a-vis the road rage of the everyday Auckland motorist, I found myself at the scooter shop.
"Red or black?" said the nice man who was only too happy to turn my plastic into the finest two-stroke that Taiwan had produced. Hell, red, I thought. Get my motor running, Head out in the bus lane ...
We completed the formalities. I rode out into the Great North Road. An Audi insisted on taking the corner into Bond St. Nothing changes, I thought, remembering that afternoon outside the Basin Reserve: We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the cars.
It's a jangle out there

Chief reporter Edward Rooney observes the view from his vintage Vespa

Observation: When you scooter past a queue of traffic to the head of a line at lights, you better be quick when the lights turn green. Every driver you passed will now be trying to kill you.
Observation: Motorists pulling out in front of you will still do so after you make eye contact with them while making praying gestures for them not to.
Observation: Buses will inch left to close the gap between them and the gutter just as you go to ride down this alley of impending death.
Observation: A scooter will always give you only just enough acceleration to get you into a swiftly closing gap of speeding traffic and then hiccup on an air bubble in the fuel line.
Observation: Waving your arms like an albatross with its feet tied to the ground and screaming "No, dear God, no!" is an invitation to motorists to pull out into your path.
Observation: All cars have a blind spot where the driver cannot see you. It is exactly where you are at any time.
Observation: Scooters suffer mechanical haemorrhages at the bottom of hills, not at the top.
Observation: All scooters are given sweet nicknames by their owners. Most of these nicknames cannot be published in a family newspaper.
Observation: Motorcyclists on bikes larger than 500cc will nod at you benignly. This is a form of farewell.
Observation: Most truck drivers believe a scooter and its rider will make an ideal ornament for the top of their grille.
Observation: When it is raining, these observations occur more frequently and at increased speeds.