Some lucky bastard is scootin' to work in Bondi Beach every day.

One of the benefits of having an Australian wife is that visiting the in-laws for the holidays means a trip down under to the flip side of the world where an NYC Winter quickly becomes a Melbourne Summer.

This year I had my scooter-eyes on to bring back a brief report on – and a few snaps of – the scootering scenes in Sydney and Melbourne.

First off, let me give a serious hats-off to anyone riding a scooter in either of these cities. Take it from someone who rides in Gotham traffic everyday, you guys, and gals, have some serious brass balls. Car drivers in Melbourne, and especially in Sydney, have a way of flipping around bends at terrifying speeds that put NYC cabbies to shame. Add to that the twists, turns, and hair-pins of Sydney’s rolling hills of traffic and it’s enough to shake the nerves of even the most seasoned rider.

Melbourne doubles-down on the danger with the presence of the city’s ubiquitous trams, slippery tram tracks and local traffic nonsense, the infamous “Hook Turn” that I swear was designed for the single intent of testing the mettle of foreign tourists.

Let’s just say that, while the balmy weather is appealing, I’m not sure I’d want to be out there in either city on a scooter in everyday commuter traffic.

Dedicated powered-two-wheeler parking in Sydney downtown (AKA The Central Business District.)

Scootin’ in Sydney
Our first stop was a few days in Sydney for New Years Eve 2011/2012.

If you’re a foreign scooterist visiting Australia, one of the first things you might notice on local Aussie scoots are the ubiquitous “L” and “P” plates and we saw plenty of both in the city.

An "L-Plater" in Watson's Bay, Sydney.

“L” (or “Learner”) plates are worn by scooters ridden by scooterists in their first few weeks on two-wheels following the passing an initial online test at the local licensing center. Riding as an “L” means the requirement to be accompanied by another rider with appropriate licensing, either riding two-up or accompanying on another scooter or motorcycle. The system works much like the provisional licensing in New York but with visible notification to other drivers (and the cops) that you haven’t quite got your scooter “Sea Legs” yet.

Once you’ve gotten some miles behind you, you can apply for a “P” plate, which includes some restrictions including not being able to carry a passenger before easing into your full license. A system similar to the one I grew up with in England, and something I would love to see introduced in the States for all drivers. I’m convinced it leads to safer streets (my comment about corner-whipping down under aside.)

Attached to these plates my wife and I saw a good range of the usual scooter suspects naturally including a healthy dose of modern Vespas, Yamahas, Kymcos, and Hondas.

It might not have been in production for long, but at least one "La Vita" made it to Sydney.

In addition, much like last year’s trip to Paris, I was also pleased to see a decent amount of modern Peugeot scooters, another company with a historic pedigree, that currently offers a terrific portfolio of bikes that are disappointingly not sold in the US.

From a vintage perspective, if you find yourself in Sydney, do yourself a favor and swing by to check out and support S.S. Scooter Engineering who have been representing the vintage love in Sydney since 2006. They’re a much warmer friendly bunch of folks than their name suggests. The S.S. recently moved to a new workshop in the Alexandria neighborhood and are the local go-to guys for vintage repair, restorations and under-the frame performance pimping.

Finally, if local ride outs are your thing, if you have a couple of days in Sydney you’ll want to reach out to the local scooter clubs before planning your trip. In Sydney, your first stop for trip planning should be the website for the Sydney City Scooter Club that houses an active forum including the usual chatter, smack-talking, wrenching, and silliness that comprises all great scooter forums.

A Peroni billboard in Melbourne tips the hat to other Italian icons.

Movin’ in Melbourne

After a quick domestic flight, a few days in my wife’s hometown of Melbourne provided a great opportunity to swing by local legend, The Vespa House in the Collingwood neighborhood.

While Melbourne has a healthy number of scooter shops these guys deservedly wear the nostalgia crown.

The Vespa House has ruled Melbourne in the very-same location since 1956, founded like all great scooter shops by a guy called Tony from Italy. In addition to being a Piaggio, Vespa, and Gilera dealership, the jewel in the crown of the Vespa House is the fantastic workshop that drips with history and continues to actively take care of the vintage and four-stroke bikes of this very busy city.

The shop, now in its third generation of the same family, includes Giovanni (Johnny) Scriba who has put in an incredible 40-plus years as the in-house Vespa mechanic.

Outside The Vespa House in 2012.

The same location back in the day. Spot the Lammy. Photo courtesy The Vespa House.

If you’re into vintage bikes of another pedigree, don’t hold-your-breath for a sight of a Lambretta however. While the workshop does service Innocentis, its website claims that the business has seen four times as many Vespas than Lammys, particularly back in the rivalry heydays.

For a sense of the history of the place, check out the gallery over at the Vespa House website which includes some fantastic images from the past 50 plus years.

Customer bikes inside The Vespa House.

If you’re looking to soak up some more Italian nostalgia in Melbourne, the city is home to some terrific Italian coffee houses that put American coffee to shame, including – but by no means exclusive to – the “Little Italy” neighborhood stretch on Lygon Street where you’ll occasionally spot a vintage scoot or two, even if it is sitting there for display purposes propping up a couple of Cappuccinos., or better yet, some of the best Gelati on the planet. Personally, operational or not, I’m always happy to see a scooter in any shape or form. Seeing an old bike as décor always brings a smile to my face.

Like Sydney, Melbourne is also home to a number of active scooter clubs including the Vespa Club of Melbourne, Melbourne Crusaders and the Vintage Vespa and European Motor Scooter Club and if you ask nicely through their forums, they’ll no doubt set you up with an experience in the city.

If you find yourself joining one of the local clubs for a ride out, you may also want to check out Melbourne Vespa Tour who offer modern Vespas to rent for city traversal.

All said and done, we had a terrific trip and I can’t wait to head back to the Southern hemisphere to check out more on the active scooter scenes of these two terrific cities. If you’re also fortunate enough to make the trip, not only will you have an amazing time you’ll also get to experience modern scooter culture at its best. A warm “G’Day” and “How yer goin’” to all our Aussie NYCS readers.

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Ah, the Kymco People. This poor CraigsList seller doesn’t seem to be able to attract a buyer in a sea of Vespa love. And that’s a shame, because the People is a well regarded, reliable, and well reviewed scooter.

Go ahead and put this Borough Park seller out of their misery and pick up a very nice commuter in the process at a bargain price: just $1300. At an MSRP of $2,799 that’s a heck of a saving on a bike with only 1200 miles on the clock.

Tis’ the season for scooter bargains as owners decide to sell rather than store for the Winter. Check out the poster’s CraigsList page here to get in touch or check out the LA Time’s take on why the People is a great scooter here.

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Image courtesy of The Genuine Scooter Company.

Motorcycle.com doesn’t just reserve its love for the humble scooter’s more burly brother. On occasion it dishes out its admiration in our particular category.

The website has just unveiled its awards for the best of 2011 and has declared the four-stroke iteration of the much-loved Genuine Stella its scooter of the year. The dot-com have picked up on the bike for the same reason scooterists the world over have: It’s seemingly last way to ride a modern bike with all the benefits of a four-stroke power plant, but with a geared transmission to keep you engaged in the ride.

In second place, honorable mention goes to Kymco’s GTi 300 edition of the “People.” With its generous capacity, fuel-injection, and sixteen-inch wheels, the GTi demonstrates some serious muscle on the road.

Head on over to Motorcycle.com to read about all the winners here.

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The new Kymco Like 200i – if you think the models look cramped, then we recommend you try before you buy.

David Harrington over at JustGottaScoot.com continues to bring great scooter related news and reviews to the web and this time he’s back with another comprehensive scooter review. This time, Kymco’s unashamed take on the Vespa LX, the Like200i.

Whatever you, I, or David think of the name “Like”, it turns out that there’s actually a lot to “like” about the scooter – there I said it.

David and his fellow reviewer Jordana found that the bike has nice (albeit lifted) styling, good pick-up, nice storage with a top-case as standard, and in particular great braking with disc brakes fitted as standard both front and back. The bike also plumps for 12″ wheels giving it an air of classic with the added value of additional handling.

The one caveat emptor? Ergonomics. David doesn’t outright say it, so I will, it sounds like the scooter has been understandably designed more for the frame of its South East Asian target audience leaving some of us Westerners feeling a little cramped in the leg-room department. However, as David points out, testing the sitting position is an important decision on any scooter purchase, and the Like still has a large potential audience here in the US.

To read JustGottaScoot.com’s full review, click here. The Like 200i is available in Black, Red and Ivory and retails for a very competitive $3,399.

No word yet on when we’ll be seeing the Like 200i in NYC, but Kymco’s area dealers here are Vespa Soho/Carbon Negative and Coney Island Avenue’s Prospect Cycles. Prospect Cycles currently stock the Like in its 50cc incarnation.

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Parking in Ho Chi Minh City. Not a center stand in sight.

Last week I talked about my few brief days in Southern Vietnam and the scooter culture there. In part 2 we move into Cambodia. But before we move on, one last note about Vietnam:

If it’s one thing Vietnamese scooterists seem to like to do with their rides it’s customize. But not in the radical sense of a complete chop-down. More a thing here, a thing there. Almost every rider I saw had replaced some small part of their scooter with a custom part to add a little extra bling. A wing-mirror here, a fender there; and chrome is a big factor no matter the accessory. On every other street corner in Ho Chi Minh City, a scooter bauble could be bolted on to your ride for a couple of bucks. Every bike also comes with a kick-stand as standard even the latest catalog of Vespas which are sold without USA style center-stands. In part I think to help park these beasts. With parking spaces consisting of hundreds of scooters leaning onto their stands, parking a straight-up center-stand scoot would, well, just not fit in.

Decals are also big here and I saw several shops that specialized in letting riders pick from a thick catalog of decals and have them applied “while-you-wait.” Brand new Vespas in particular seemed to be targets for these embellishments with entire cowls, fairings, or leg-shields jazzed up with Manga characters, flowers, swirls and other patterns. Want your helmet to match? No problem.

A vintage Vespa used as an art display outside a restaurant. Note the PX in the background. A dying breed here.

With four days in Ho Chi Minh city behind me it was time to hit the road to Cambodia.

Scooter prevalence, of course, continues into Cambodia and the route we took there revealed some other interesting facts about scootering in this part of the world. For one, you never drive more than a five mile stretch of highway without encountering some form of scooter service, whether it’s a gasoline stop, repairs, or an opportunity to purchase a brand new scoot.

Rather than counting on full-service gas stations, make-shift gas stops litter the side of the highways with gasoline sold by the liter in re-used soda bottles. In fact, it took me a few times of seeing pee colored Pepsi to figure out that these stalls were selling gas and not refreshments.

One of a small handful of vintages spotted on the road to Cambodia.

Scooter repair is generally indicated by two or three sixteen inch tires tied together into a makeshift pyramid and placed road side. Whoever was the first to think of this, I don’t know, but it has certainly become the scooter equivalent of the barber’s red and white pole to telegraph repairs. It is not unusual either at the side of the highway or on street corners in the major towns and cities including Ho Chi Minh to see a couple of guys set up on stools and working on scoots right there and then on the sidewalk. Usually the guys had a simple set of tools, a couple of spares, and a wire-brush which seemed to be the ubiquitous solve to all scooter ills.

After a few hours of driving we arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Phnom Penh is also the home of the Cambodian Tuk Tuk, a recent introduction to the country according to the locals. Rather than its more famous Thailand cousin, the Cambodian Tuk Tuk is not a complete unit vehicle similar to the Piaggio Ape, but rather a colorful passenger trailer that is connected to a pivot welded to the back of a normal scooter. During off-duty hours it was not unusual to see these scooters buzzing around the city without their trailers, no doubt taking the taxi driver home at the end of his shift.

Phnom Penh is also home to the famous Russian Market, a sprawling undercover market so called because it is the market most frequented by foreigners rather than locals who up until recently were mostly Russians (remember Cambodia has a troubled Communist history.)

As is typical in this part of the world, the market, like the streets, is divided into sections specializing in particular goods. Also like everywhere else in this part of the world, one of those goods is scooter spares. The scooter section is overwhelming with close to one hundred back-to-back stalls hawking scooter spares. Some gently used, some not-so-gently used and others brand new.

Every imaginable part can be purchased here including full chassis and engines although don’t expect said engine to be new. Much like Vietnam, the Honda Cub and various Asian clones rules the roost of scootering here. Syms, PGOs and Yamahas being similarly popular.

Sixteen inch wheels are in and, sadly, eight and ten inch wheels are most definitely out. In fact in my five days in Cambodia I didn’t see a single vintage Vespa or Lambretta. Maybe they never made it here in any significant numbers, I don’t know. Without the French colonization that was part of Vietnam’s past but not Cambodia’s. Cambodia or Kampuchea as it was once known never had a European connection.

Why uncrate scoots at the dealership when they sell faster than you can unpack them?

In the section of town specializing in selling new scooters however modern scoots were plentiful and were literally being sold directly out of the crate at many dealerships. A Cambodian I spoke to told me that a new scooter is typically close to a year’s wages in his country so it’s no wonder that these bikes become a critical part of the family and are kept running at all costs.

That’s it for this week. Next week in the third and final part I’ll wrap up my adventures in SE Asia with a few days in Bangkok where I finally found what I had personally been looking for, vintage scoots aplenty.

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Photograph courtesy of Carbon Negative

The folks behind Vespa SoHo and Williamsburg’s McCarren Motors are expanding their empire further into a concept store they’re calling Carbon Negative.

Recognizing that there is a national appetite to go green (and potentially save money) Vespa SoHo has also recognized that a motorscooter isn’t necessarily the right transportation fit for every New Yorker.

Carbon Negative unveiled at the formerly McCarren Motors location in Brooklyn is busy prepping itself for the 2010 riding season and will stock bikes in categories Gas, No Gas, and 100% Human. In addition to the Vespas and Kymco Scooters already stocked by the company, the store is branching out into the world of electric bicycles and traditional pedal powered commuters.

The store will continue to offer a wide-range of services including scooter maintenance, damage repair and storage.

Will be bringing you more news on Carbon Negative over the coming weeks. In the meantime, for more information, visit CarbonNegative.com, Carbon Negative’s twitter feed, facebook page or YouTube channel.

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Up for grabs today is a six-month old Kymco that’s been de-restricted from 50cc to something creeping closer to a top speed of 50mph. Given a brand new 150cc (approx 50mph) People has an MSRP of $2799 plus taxes and fees, picking up this CraigsList find for $2000 could save you $1000+ on a practically new bike.

Visit the original posting here.

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While for our money – a little hair-raising on the means streets of Manhattan given its low profile – Honda Ruckus fans should be proud to hear that their scoot is currently sitting comfortably at the top of the heap of Motorcycle.com‘s 2009 highest user ratings.

Honda’s fantastic scoot sits atop an eye-opening top ten that really should be a go-to list for anyone considering their first (or next) set of wheels.

While the Ruckus neatly sits at #1, Chicago’s Genuine Scooters’ Buddy really is the force to be reckoned with here, occupying slots #2 and #3 in its stock and Black Jack forms and #5 in its International Italia form. A staggering 3 out of the top 10 2009 scooters.

Yamaha follows up with two contenders in the top ten. The Vino 125 at #6 and the Zuma 125 at #8.

250cc bikes are amply represented by Asian favorite scooters Sym RV250, Kymco Xciting 250 Ri occupying slots #4 and #10 respectively.

Finally Piaggio rounds out the bunch with its flagship scoot, the Vespa LX150 sitting at a respectable but lack-luster #7 and the GTS 250 at #9.

Motorcycle’s star and user-ratings are a little arcane – glance at the top ten shows a higher rating for the Buddy at #2 than the Ruckus at #1 for example – but we’ll put our trust in the MC staff and go along.

For the full-access list, click here.

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Personally, this was a factor in me purchasing the Vespa S150, which with the removal of the glove compartment opens up the leg room for a taller rider (I’m 6’3′.)

Based on my height, the article recommends the Kymco Super 9 or the Aprilia Scarabeo but hey, I’m prepared to suffer a little lower back pain for the classic styling of the Vespa.

For shorter folks, particularly women who need to ensure their feet fall flat on the ground for safety, Naomi de la Mora of San Francisco Scooter Girls recommends the Genuine Scooters’ Buddy, the Yamaha Vino or the Honda Metropolitan.

Head on over to NPR for the full article.

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In the market for a scooter but not sure to go Italian, Taiwanese or Japanese?

During the gas crunch of last year, the La Times’ throttle jockey Susan Carpenter put together a fantastic video and written review comparing three new scooters in the 125-150cc range:

• The Vespa S150
• Yamaha Vino 125
• Kymco People 150

After spending time with all three, Susan had great things to say about each scooter depending on your requirements as a rider.

Susan had no doubt voting the Vespa S the big winner on style and performance, but also noted it as the most stable out of the three especially freeway riding. In fact, it was the only scooter out of the three that she “felt comfortable riding on the freeway.”

In contrast, Susan had the most fun tooling around on the Taiwanese Kymco People, which she found to be very nimble, but not stable at speed due to the the thinner-set tires.

Finally, the Japanese Yamaha Vino was her choice for the budget scooterist. Reliable, economical and with probably the best storage out of the three.

For the full written and video reviews, head on over to “Scooting around the gas crunch” at LAtimes.com

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