Calgary’s scooter aficionados celebrate Vespa’s 70th birthday

Calgary Vespa enthusiasts joined riders across Canada, taking to the streets and sharing their love for the quirky bikes with a 70-kilometre ride to commemorate the birth of a scooter legend.

Calgary organizer Darren Ward said his love affair with scooters started when he was just a kid.

He now owns 10 scooters, eight of them Vespas.

“It was more of a lifestyle thing,” Ward said of his scooter obsession.

“I was into scooters before I was old enough to ride them, so it was an obvious choice.

“I use them as everyday transport but I also have my special ones that I use for special occasions, for the weekend and things like that.”

The first Vespas were built after the Second World War by the Piaggio aircraft company, when the manufacturer stopped making planes and parts for the Italian Air Force.

The Vespa filled a need for an affordable mode of transportation at the time, proving an economical way to get people moving in postwar Italy.

“They’re huge — they invented a whole segment of vehicles,” said David Anderson of Blackfoot Motosports. “Step-through scooters are everywhere now, they’ve really conquered the world. “And Vespa was the first.” Ward got his first Vespa at age 15, one year before he was legally allowed to ride it on the roads, but he still found a way to enjoy his scooter.

“I just rode it around the backyard for a while, dreaming and hoping,” Ward said.

“And by the time I was 16, I had two of them.”

Ward owns motorcycles as well as scooters, but said he didn’t enjoy riding bigger bikes as much, finding he was riding for the “sake of it, rather to enjoy it.”

Ward said the birth of his daughter rekindled his love of scooters.

“It was something I could put her on the back of safely, we could putter around town and go shopping,” Ward said. “She’s 17 now and she has her own scooter.”

Anderson said Vespa means “wasp” in Italian, so named because of the buzzing sound of the two-stroke engines.

Scootering in Calgary has been growing steadily for years, according to Anderson, thanks to the Piaggio brand branching out.

“(Piaggio) make everything from airplanes to scooters,” he said.

“Over in Europe, they’ve been buying all these Italian heritage brands. And all those sort of obscure, Italian brands have been our biggest growing brands lately.”

Anderson said part of the Vespa’s appeal is the culture associated with the scooter.

“It’s something that’s genuinely different, something that’s got sort of a quirky, cosmopolitan character that people are really attracted to,” Anderson said.

“They feel like they have permission to buy now.

“And when you get on a scooter, you can sort of participate in a bigger, global community in a way that you couldn’t before when Calgary was more of an outpost.”

They’re huge — they invented a whole segment of vehicles. Step-through scooters are everywhere now, they’ve really conquered the world. And Vespa was the first.