It is absurdly difficult to get around town with a passenger on a 50cc scooter. What most of these eco-friendly, new-entry scooter enthusiasts have picked is a modern, 4-stroke scooter. This *is* less fuel efficient than a 2-stroke, and has a lower power-to-weight ratio, but it’s cleaner. Additionally, modern scooters have catalytic converters, further reducing emissions.

Yes, in some cases, your tiny 50cc scooters can skirt around a few laws and pump out a ton of crap. Since these 50cc bikes are also perfect for getting around small towns, dense, slow-moving traffic, and smaller roads, they’re what end up in other countries, too. That’s why, for example, a scooter-heavy city like Taipei has such a heavy veil of smog.

That said, electrics aren’t much of an option, either. For one, I travel outside the range of an electric scooter fairly often. Charging isn’t exactly as simple as filling a tank with gas, so I’d have to own two vehicles, which actually worsens my environmental impact, since now I have two vehicles, twice the manufacturing, twice the materials, and at the end of their usable lives, twice the waste.

It doesn’t end there. People seem to think that electricity is this magically clean resource. It’s not. It’s energy, stored in a chemical medium, to be released. What’s used as this medium? In many cases, lead-acid batteries. We’re just now seeing a move to Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries, and the Prius is slated to move to Lithium-Ion batteries. Over time, these batteries cannot be recharged, and then we have to take into account the impact of recycling these batteries.

The scooter isn’t perfect, but a modern one does meet even California’s strict emissions standards, without skirting around a single rule. Can it be cleaner? Sure. Can we move to diesel (and therefore biodiesel?) Maybe. Are alternative fuels a good idea? Of course. Let’s just not paint scooters as a consistent problem, especially when going off of invalid numbers. The scooter is still the cleanest option for 95% of my use cases, where I actually do have to travel to places within timeframes that public transportation cannot address.

- The air is dirtier in the Dominican Republic because their scooters are old 2-stroke designs. Noisy, yes. The vast majority of scooters sold in the US today are four stroke. These are fuel efficient vehicles and very, very quiet. Riding my scooter on the freeway sounds a bit like riding a sewing machine at 80mph.

- Electric scooters aren’t ready for prime time yet. Besides the cost, they simply don’t have a sufficient range to make them useful.

- I know Bryce. I count him as a friend. That said, I believe he is mistaken about the pollution levels _per_mile_ of scooters, having been suckered in by the same faulty information cited by this story. While scooters may put out more pollutants as a percentage of volume, their overall volume is far less than any car. The better metric would be grams of pollutant per mile, and this is in fact what the EPA counts.

- Everything Ecorazzi thinks they know about scooters is either incorrect or twenty years out of date. Modern scooters are not the same beast as the loud, obnoxious two-stroke scooters of yesteryear. They are cleaner, more fuel efficient, and quieter than any gasoline-burning car or motorcycle on the road today. Please stop using two-stroke scooters as a point of comparison — it is misleading at best.

- There are no solar or biodiesel scooters on the market today. While there have been announcements about research and prototyping, there are no hybrid scooters either.

“ou might think it’s over the top, but it’s actually true. Now, if motorcycles had all the same emissions requirements that cars did, they would obviously be much less polluting than a comparable car. However, they are held to a lower standard, and manufacturers don’t tend to exceed the standards by much, if at all. It costs more money to do it, which then increases retail prices significantly. Scooters are already have a tough enough price to value ratio for most consumers to swallow. As evidenced by how often MV members hear “I could buy a real bike for that much!”

Riding a scooter isn’t environmentally friendly in terms of direct vehicle emissions. The sad truth is that if Americans switched over to scooters tomorrow as our primary form of transportation, our air would get much dirtier. If you want to look at the system as a whole, it takes far less energy to manufacture and transport a scooter. So you’re ahead there. You’re also using less fuel, which means less of the stuff being pumped from the ground, refined, and transported on your behalf. You’re also doing your part to ease traffic congestion, which does help reduce local air pollution. So don’t be disheartened or think me too much of a buzzkill. Your scooter is eco-friendly in some ways, if not in a very direct sort of way.

If it makes you feel better, riding an electric scooter or driving an electric car shouldn’t be a salve for anyone’s conscience. Most electricity in the US is not from clean sources. By the time all is said and done, driving an electric car can be more polluting than driving a petro-fueled one. Electric vehicles at this point simply cause emissions relocation, but almost never cause reduction.”

Funniest. Quote. Yet.

I’m going to take issue with the tone of some of these comments. While the information in the article may be misguided — and we all know that two-stroke scooters are not the greatest — I think the problem is that people automatically assume that scooters are super-green; when in fact they carry their own issues. Sure, they’re much better for the environment than an SUV, but I’ve been to the Dominican Republic — where scooters outnumber cars greatly — and that place has worse air quality than anything back home. Not to mention the noise that scooters emit. I’ll take a car driving by over a scooter any day.

What’s the solution: Electric. I’m not saying paying $9K for a Vectrix is feasible at this moment, but eventually such options will kill the argument entirely; especially if your power comes from solar or wind. Till then, continue riding your 4-stroke scooters. If not green, your commuting options are definitely more efficient.

And remember, these discussions should be to educate and not ridicule someone. Her article wasn’t filled with obscenities or nasty remarks. Your passionate views to correct her errors make some of you look like asses.

These factors should be painfully apparent to anyone passing an automobile wrecking yard . . the typical automobile is tens of times more massive and contains equally larger amounts of toxic materials and their byproducts, compared to any scooter.

I drive daily one of the “larger” scooters – a Honda Helix. It weighs about 350 pounds, and, I would guess, will produce only a small fraction of the pollutants that (say) a Mercury Sable will create when each is finally scrapped.

Incidentally, although I get only about 60 miles per gallon of fuel, and an “oil change” demands less than one quart of oil; my scooter’s electrical system employs a battery that appears to be about 1/4 the mass of a typical automotive battery, and it’s cooling system demands one and a half quarts of coolant, as opposed to several gallons of this highly polluting mixture in a passenger car. The two small tires on my scooter demand perhaps a tenth of the environmental burden than the automobile tires, and the brake dust from my Helix is far, far less than that produced by even the lightest auto.

If you think that these figures are of lesser importance than exhaust emissions, think again; every auto out there – including those lovely “green” hybrids with their enormous toxic battery banks – carries its natal burden of pollution right up to the moment of paying that “terminal” pollution bill at the end of its life. Driving fewer miles will not avoid those environmental burdens, merely put them off until a little later. In the meantime, “consumables” for the automobile create an environmental nightmare, compared to the relatively simple needs of my scooter.

Everything taken into account, scooters are a tiny blip on the pollution landscape, compared to the mountain of poisons that represents each car and truck.

Please keep the conversation going. I’d like to get all sides on this one.