Article Keyword Videos to Watch
Travel
Click on the image to start the video.
|
Related Topics
Images - Links - Articles
Houston
Related Images
|
Gas Scooters
Focus: fuel efficiency
They may be called ‘gas scooters’ but the great thing about them is they don’t use very much of the stuff at all. If you’ve been used to gassing-up a car or other four wheeled vehicle, then gassing-up a scooter will give you a big, big shock. How far would one gallon take your gas-guzzler? Probably a few miles, whilst the scooter would possibly last all week on that same gallon. When’s the last time you heard “one gallon please” for a car?
Gas Scooters nowadays are built with the technology of the age and mpg’s of 100 are by no means rare in this new age of the scooter. If you are just running around town or are using your car for getting to work, probably by yourself, you may wonder at all these things popping past you in traffic jams and cutting out the queues on the way to work every day. The people on these machines seem happy with their and they are always ahead of you when you get to work.
These ‘new breed’ of motorised velocipedors, both male and female, are not as new as you may think. The same thing has been happening in Rome for 60 years. In Madrid, London, Bangkok and Berlin, Paris, Cairo and Delhi these scooters are such a regular occurrence that they are hardly even noticed as out of the ordinary.
The people in the USA, historically, in the days when gas was cheap all the time, never bothered to worry about its possibility of price fluctuation. Cars and station wagons could easily be run from the household budget, so the bigger and faster the car the better. The bigger the engine size the more you impress the neighbors, the bigger the car the more gas you have to put in it. Short runs in winter in a big car can use a few gallons just going to the local store.
However, nowadays, what with oil at over a barrel; internecine and international strife and terrorism rife; the discomfiture of some Arab countries, and indeed some from South America and the rest of the world at the general oil situation; coupled with the need to conserve it before it runs out; are some of the reasons why more-and-more people in the USA are at last taking a lesson from the rest of the world in the economic use of resources.
Many people in the USA are opening their eyes and finding that they could get to work for as little as a few bucks a week instead of the 100 bucks it would cost to get in by car (traffic jams included). The cheap to buy and very cheap to run gas scooters on the US market today are starting to make a big inroad into the American personal transport market.
Of course they have been knocking around all over the world for years, mainly, it must be said, in countries without much oil, and therefore the incentive to minimalise on what is available. Now shortages are apparent and alternative power sources will have to be used within the very foreseeable future to prevent complete collapse of the energy system, it has been said, the answer must be to economise on what is left in terms of fossil fuels. Only gradually is this message getting across to consumers in the US who have always has the benefit of cheap oil products until now.
The other thing, which not everyone mentions perhaps, is that gas scooters are very good fun.
Instead of getting into your car for the daily traffic jam you have the freedom of the road. With your gas scooters under you, you will be able to fly through the hold-ups, be first at the traffic lights and not have to bother with a parking space. Time for a quick coffee before the boss arrives? Nope. He has a scooter too!
About the Author: Independent Author in Thailand
|
