Scooters as City Vehicles?

The City of Fort Collins, Colorado has purchased some Yamaha C3's as official city vehicles. City employees can volunteer to use these scooters instead of motor-pool cars. They are being given training, and must wear helmets, long pants, and closed-toe shoes. To read more, click here.

The comments on the article show the ignorance of the general populace about scooters. The same old arguments come up: they're bad for the environment, they're toys, they're not safe. All bunk! Modern 4-stroke scooters aren't the polluters that the old 2-strokers of the 60's and 70's were. The C3 is probably the most environmentally-friendly scooter made. It's as clean as any standard car, probably more so, since it gets over 115 MPG. As for safety, I always find it ironic when car drivers call scooters dangerous because most of that danger comes from car drivers. To read more about whether scooters are safe (and interesting facts about scooter thefts) see this NPR story.

Anyway, kudos to Fort Collins for putting their money where their mouth is. Lancaster may have written into its Strategic Plan that they want to encourage scooter use, but Fort Collins is actually being the change they promote.