Scooters gain a popular foot-hold

Scooters, once the preserve of urban hipsters, are becoming a mass-market phenomena

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Writer

LONDON (CNN) -- Harried Londoners rely on them to get a leg-up in the daily commuting scrum. In Tokyo, they are giving Pokémon fans a run for their Pikachus.

And in France, le tout Paris is agog over la trotinette -- the stick-like scooters with polyurethane wheels, rear wheel brakes and adjustable handlebars whose devotees run from teeny boppers in tank-tops to septuagenarian grandmothers.

We have a minimum of 4,000 coming in every week from now until Christmas, and I still can't get enough, said Richard Birchwood, co-owner with his father, John, of the Liverpool-based J and R Sports, the exclusive supplier of the JD Bug scooter to retailers throughout Britain.

The original scooter -- the Micro -- is a sort of souped-up aluminium skateboard that folds for easy storage in a handbag or car trunk. It was born in a Swiss inventor's garage and spread to Asia, which remains their main manufacturing base.

In the past year, however, the gadgets hit European and American boulevards, where they found a ready niche as a mobile fashion accessory for urban hipsters.

In ads, the elegant silver contraption is billed as the ultimate urban assault scooter for use in malls, on footpaths, or virtually anywhere you can ride it.

And at virtually any speed: Birchwood said one British scooter aficionado was clocked by a policeman at 39 miles an hour.

That would be an unofficial speed record. Non-motorised scooters can generally attain speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, weigh up to 2.5 kilograms (about 6 pounds) and support around 400 pounds.

Most range in price from Ł50 ($75) for a no-frills model, to as much as Ł750 ($1,000) for higher-tech gadgets with underboard suspension and customised brakes and wheel guards. Some of the newer generation models are equipped with features for the acrobatically-inclined.

Yet beyond the slick image, a fad that began as the preserve of urban youth is now gaining mainstream respectability.

In Britain, staff at the US-owned Asda/Wal-Mart hypermarket near Bristol have been furnished with the sleek scooters to help cut down on the time it would otherwise take to navigate the 100,000-square-foot shop floor.

And in Brussels, Belgium, capital of the European Union, the scooter-brief has suddenly popped up on the ministerial agenda:

The regional transport minister for the Brussels region, Robert Delatouwer, said on Wednesday he hoped regional traffic codes would soon be amended to reflect the rise of alternative modes of transport such as in-line skates and scooters.

Among his proposals: a law that would allow scooter-users and skaters to share the road with drivers, rather than have to fend with throngs of pedestrians on busy city sidewalks.

I believe that the scooter could provide a safe and serious mode of transport, said Delatouwer, who has purchased several collapsible scooters for the use of his staff.

Retailers have been quick to latch on to the growing scooter phenomenon, filling entire floor displays with a multi-coloured array of scooters for every age from six to 60. Promotional brochures sing the praises of the gadgets' aircraft-quality alloys and spectacular riding performance pitches that might seem better-suited to top-of-the-line motorcycles or sports cars.

Carrefour, a French retail giant, launched its national sales campaign for the scooters on Wednesday. By Thursday evening, according to a spokesman, the retail chain had already found buyers for 70 percent of the scooters included in the initial offer. The company estimates 250,000 will be sold across France by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, rival Auchan is rolling out its own line of scooters throughout its 118 stores. In the US, Wal-Mart has heeded the clarion call from consumers as well.

For many reasons, this is a product that has democratised itself, said a Carrefour spokesman. Offering one example of the scooter's utility, he said: A mother who could not keep up with her children on roller blades and skateboards before, can now give chase on scooters.

Nor does the spectacle of a mother on a scooter in hot pursuit of her wayward teenagers draw much attention on French streets these days.

People are no longer turning their heads to stare at them, though they are still considered pretty cool, the Carrefour spokesman said.

Birchwood, of J and R Sports, said the scooters have made the biggest splash so far in London and along the southeast coast of England -- Britain's traditional breeding grounds for new forms of street-and-beach chic.

The scooter is appealing because it's so lightweight. I think that's why it started to hit so quickly in London. People just jump on the Tube with it and when you come out of the Tube you just jump on and you're off.

Not everyone in Britain has embraced the scooter frenzy, however. One newspaper columnist, writing in The Independent, a broadsheet daily, wrote of his amazement at seeing a grown man float past him on a scooter at a Stansted airport terminal recently.

Not knowing it was the coming thing, I imagined simply that the man was either deranged or a retarded eight-year-old or affected in the way that people who carry fly whisks or Spanish fans or monocles look affected. It never occurred to me that this little toy was a harbinger of the new feng shui.

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