Toronto beat the scooter out of me
The cute, economic mode of transportation just doesn’t fit into the city’s urban landscape
There are few vehicles on Toronto’s torn-up, potholed downtown streets that bring smiles of admiration from silver-haired women and small children alike, but a purring scooter at a red light is a source of curiosity. It’s cute, economical (or it should be) and a definite conversation piece.
But after nine years of near-death experiences, ripoff repairs and myopic municipal leaders, I am selling my much-loved gas-powered scooter. It just doesn’t fit in to this urban landscape.
I put my 2010 black Yamaha Vino125 cc up for sale at PowersportsTO, a shop in Little Italy.
“No serious interest,” owner Doug Goss tells me after three weeks. “Why?” I ask. “It’s Ontario licensing laws,” he tells me. “They are dumb.”
By “dumb” he meansthe one-size-fits all regulations for two-wheel motor vehicles. Anyone who rides a motorized bike other than an e-bike in Ontario must have a valid motorcycle licence. This doesn’t make sense to me. Scooters and motorcycles are different animals. For one thing, any scooter of less than 150 cc is prohibited from riding on the 400series highways. So why does a rider of a city-only scooter (50 or 125 cc) need to go through the hassle of writing a knowledge test and a taking a road test (part of the road test is on a highway) to get a motorcycle licence when they can only travel on city streets and use it to go to the grocery store, the gym and their office in the financial district?
Another deterrent is a scooter rider has little choice but to take a $500 weekend motorcycle course to save 50 per cent on the cost of mandatory insurance. My insurance was just over $300 per year with the course — and I can’t even ride in the winter months.
These regulations have “cannibalized scooter sales,” says Goss and forced him to change his business. Ten years ago, when his shop was called Motoretta, he sold only scooters. In January this year, he rebranded and made the shift to selling 85 per cent motorcycles. It was a matter of survival. When I got my first scooter, a 2006 gun metal silver Yamaha Vino 125 in 2008, I didn’t think of any of this.
Maybe I was love-blind. I got hooked after a trip to Key West, Fla., when I spent an entire day riding circles around the tiny island, from the Hemingway House museum, past the odd strolling rooster and drunk tourist, along the crystalline Gulf to the TGI Fridays and back. It suited me.
During my first few years I developed an intimacy with Toronto, exploring undiscovered areas, from parks to back streets. I loved the smiles I elicited, especially the look of awe on the 8-year-old girl, face pressed against the minivan window, plotting her own future on two wheels. People generally gave me space and I felt safe-ish. I engaged with strangers who asked questions wanting to know if this was the right option for them.
I made some mistakes though, like taking my bike to an unlicensed repair shop to get an oil change and having the engine mysteriously fail the next day. The owner, whose mechanic was not provincially certified to work on bikes, denied responsibility.
After the disastrous oil change, I went to a Yamahalicensed garage where the diagnosis was “a screw having been dropped in the engine.” I was charged $700 in labour to take the engine apart and install a $30 part, which took weeks to arrive due to a hurricane in Japan. With few licensed repair shops in Toronto, all charging between $75 to $100 per hour in labour, I had little choice but to pay.
While waiting for the part, I got impatient and bought a new scooter — a black 2010 Yamaha Vino 125 — and sold my old one for what it cost to repair it. The amount of money I was dropping on this passion was nothing compared to the fear that was building each time I went for a ride. The day in November 2011, when a driver of a car moved into my lane on Danforth Ave. and knocked me into a parked Lexus was scary and sobering. I kept riding after that, but never with the same peace of mind. I worried constantly about getting hit.
I could forecast an eventual end to my scooter days in 2013, when the city started to enforce a bylaw disallowing anything with an engine from parking on sidewalks. Now, any scooter regardless of its size, was relegated to parking on the street — albeit for free — but at risk of being damaged either because vehicle drivers didn’t see it or out of spite for taking up limited street-parking spaces.
There just aren’t enough dedicated spots in Toronto to street park motorbikes.
By contrast, in Barcelona, where there are 56,000 dedicated parking spots just for scooters alone — not nearly enough for the more than 300,000 scooters and motorcycles there — riders can park on sidewalks and as long they aren’t obstructing pedestrians, they are not ticketed.
Nonetheless, I continued riding. I parked discreetly on sidewalks and traffic islands and got $60 fines. The last one I received was in June 2017, when I left my scooter on a traffic island outside Women’s College Hospital. I called my city councillor, Christin Carmichael Greb, who after weeks of follow up said the bylaw was in place to protect pedestrians from tripping over bikes.
“It’s an accessibility issue,” she said. “But a scooter is not a motorcycle, I countered, and surely the city can differentiate between the two?” Silence. “They don’t get it,” Goss tells me referring to government leaders. “In their minds it’s a motorcycle.”
Apart from parking issues, I just didn’t feel safe anymore and I was riding less as a result.
I wasn’t alone in my apprehension.
After 10 years of riding the streets of Toronto, David Davidson, leader of the Toronto Vintage Scooter Club, which has about 160 enthusiasts who love to ride and repair vintage scooters, still fears getting rearended by cars every time he stops at a yellow light. Most car drivers in Toronto do not stop on ambers, he says. I met Davidson and the members of his club in Kensington Market a few Sundays ago, and the talk was all about potholes and close calls with drivers. Everyone agreed you can’t own a scooter without learning to fix it yourself, not only to avoid high labour costs, but because older scooters require specialized knowledge and regular work to keep running.
Toronto fashion designer Shelli Oh, fixes her own Vespa to avoid the indignity of being a damsel in distress which happened her first year riding when she got stuck in Mississauga and had to call for help. She didn’t like feeling indebted to her rescuers, so she became her own bike mechanic. “I think if you’re riding a scooter, you shouldn’t be afraid of it. With the right tools and knowledge you should be able to fix most things on it yourself,” she says.
Good advice, but maybe too little too late for me as “afraid” has become a big part of my vocabulary.
When you consider that motorcycle accidents (the province includes mopeds and scooters in this statistic) account for 10 per cent of vehicle deaths in Ontario even though they only make up 2 per cent of vehicles on the road, it is clear that the risk is too high.
It’s the case for cyclists, too. As I finish this article one more cyclist has died on the streets of Toronto, this time a 58-year-old woman — the fourth cyclist death this year. It makes me wonder if Toronto really is the livable, global city it professes to be.
I admire the vintage scooter club riders for banding together to share information about scooter repair, and to continue riding in a city and a province that does little to make their decision to drive a small green vehicle easier: Potholes are not repaired in a timely fashion, there is no guarantee of honest and affordable repairs, no effort to add adequate safe parking options and no willingness to implement sliding scale licensing laws to address the variety and use.
It’s a shame because these nuanced little motorcycles can do all of the things a congested city needs: lessen gridlock, thin out the car population, increase quality of life and build community. But Toronto is no Barcelona — not even a Key West.