Scooters make you thin, so why won't we ride?

Photo: Jonathan Burton

Roads in other developing countries are a mass of scooters, because they save fuel, are easy to park and some even come with a roof, as shown here by Salesh Ramsurab riding his tuk tuk in Pietermaritzburg. 

Yet South Africans refuse to ride. We ask why.

Scooters cut through traffic, bestow the rider with cool, can help their riders lose weight and best of all at today’s fuel prices, they go on the smell of an oil rag. Yet South Africans for the most part refuse to ride on them because of thee myths: danger, speed and cold.

Let us help dispel them here and dangle the low, low costs of scootering - as long as you don't pioneer on an electric scooter, of course.

Danger

Photo: Jonathan Burton

The perception of danger was reinforced by Rodger Ferguson, a rider of safety-first bikers club 100s Riders, who recently told Transport MEC Willies Mchunu at a road safety meeting that motorcyclists are 75 times more likely to be killed or seriously injured in serious or fatal crashes than car drivers; and the risk of death for motorcyclists is 20 times that for car occupants.

But every minute of the day and night, millions of people from Egypt to China prove that scooters are only as dangerous as the rider is inattentive. Scooter riders as a rule go slower than bikers and slide and collide, rather than crash and burn.

Speed

After the safety fear, it is ironic that some men don’t want to scooter “because it is so slow”. But in the UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver prefers riding his Vespa, rather than sit trapped in traffic in his Aston Martin.

For while scooters cannot go fast, they can wriggle through dense traffic to end up first at every traffic light and maintain a higher average speed through any city.

Cold

As for as scooters being too exposed to the cold, celebrity survivor Bear Grylls points out that an average man in the cold can burn up to 6 000 calories a day. This is the same as what an Olympian athlete burns, according to U.S. Mayo Clinic researcher Michael Joyner, who puts an Olympic work-out’s total calorie deficit to 4 000 to 6 000 per session. Which means scootering in winter can help you lose weight.

Cost

While each rise of the fuel prise in the UK sparks a flurry of new scooter registrations, Q4U said citizens in the province’s capital are not registering more scooters. This despite the fact that the price of a a scooter, helmet and advanced rider training can cost less per month on a loan repayment than the average person spends on taxis fares.

The cheapest scooter in SA currently sells for just under ZAR7000. Melex will deliver an electric Whispa for about ZAR22k and Big Boy Scooters have a little growler for R27k. 

The running costs of scooters for also keeps money in the bank — even for a big tuk-tuk such as Salesh Ramsurab from Pietermaritzburg rides. He said his tuk-tuk costs R80 every three days, which translates to about 60 cents a kilometre.