A bruised orange…scooter.

August 17, 2009

My scooter got wrecked the other day. It was parked – legally or illegally depending on who you talk to – on the sidewalk in front of Radcliffe College at Harvard University in Cambridge.

According to Tom Tinlin and the Boston Traffic Department, for now they’ll look the other way when a scooter is parked on the sidewalk. Yes, this was in Cambridge, but where Boston goes many towns follow suit.

Further, the Cambridge police have not yet begun to ticket scooters or even motorcycles that are parked in random ways around the city.

But that’s not here nor there. This isn’t a discussion about parking or sidewalks or even traffic, it’s a little diatribe about how evil people are.

Evil?

Certainly.

Why?

Because it didn’t take a physicist or even a mechanical engineer to figure out that a scooter on the sidewalk, two-three feet from the curb, was in no danger from any normal vehicle. Bikes, motorcycles, cars and even minivans wouldn’t be able to even reach a scooter parked where it was on the sidewalk.

I even have my doubts that a pickup truck would be able to reach my scooter based on where it rested when I left it Friday morning.

But when I returned to the scooter at 11:40AM, it was jammed into a street sign and the entire right side of the scoot had been creased by something unyeilding. Please understand that the side of the scooter is another foot off the ground.

So we have a high curb and an even higher scooter. And that scooter had damage all down the side and even had a sliver of plastic removed from the seat three feet higher than the ground. What’s that make you think hit my scooter?

Right! It had to be a bus (MBTA folks aren’t the best drivers but I can’t believe they’d hit & run my scooter), a landscaping vehicle (Radcliffe was having the lawns manicured that morning, a delivery vehicle (reference my prior rant about the UPS Store and maybe someone in brown decided what they could do for me was mangle my scooter), or maybe it was a Harvard shuttle.

Regardless of the vehicle or the thoughtless driver, my scooter is now wrecked. I just got off the phone with the dealer who is determining whether the amount of damage is significant enough to total the vehicle.

Know what that means? Right. I’m out one scooter.

Why?

Because vehicle insurance doesn’t cover replacement cost – as far as I know – it covers blue book value. And that blue book value for my scooter is a measley $1300. Minus my deductible, that puts $1000 in my pocket to shop for a new scooter.

Trouble is, a new scooter will be $3000 so my scooter habit has effectively ended.

All because some thoughtless boob crushed my scooter.

People are idiots. They can’t drive. And they don’t care about other people’s things.

If you can share a story about peace and love and kindness, keep it to yourself. I’m moping tonight about my broken scooter and I’m so mad I’m seeing orange.

More to come…