Ban Scooters and Other 'Gateway' Vehicles

The Cape Girardeau City Council is attempting to regulate scooters rather than doing the right thing and outlawing those two-wheeled menaces entirely.

Instead of banning them outright, the council is on-track to just limiting where scooters may be ridden, requiring riders to wear a helmet and possibly making them carry insurance on their motorized putt-putts.

You might as well try to douse an inferno using a teacup.

Scooters are not just unsafe at any speed, they're also a gateway vehicle to motorcycles, leather vests with fringe on the bottom, tattoos, piercings, AC/DC music, Hell's Angels membership and will probably result in the demise of Western Civilization if we don't stop their proliferation -- NOW.

Someone needs to draw a line in the sand, and I urge the Cape Girardeau City Council to make this our Maginot Line. Don't pussyfoot around merely prohibiting riders from certain streets or mandating them to wear helmets. If anything, the proposal to restrict them to streets with speed limits not exceeding 35 miles per hour makes them more dangerous.

Here's a pop quiz for the council members: Where is the bulk of the shopping in Cape Girardeau? If you answered, Seimer's Drive you would be correct. And how many, routes to Seimer's have a speed limit of 35 miles per hour or less?

One. Bloomfield Road.

Curvy, narrow, dark, mostly shoulder-less and hilly Bloomfield Road. It is also the main route to the Lutheran Home, one of the larger senior citizen and assisted care housing facilities in the area.

If these new city regulations are implemented, a scooter-ista wanting to putt-putt their way to Seimer's Drive, will have to run a gauntlet of predominantly white Buicks, Lincolns and Cadillacs -- some being driven by octogenarians without the best eye sight -- who either live or are visiting friends or family at the Lutheran Home campus. Do I need to draw a picture?

I've not sure if this is a case where the City Council is being clueless or diabolical. While I think scooters are a menace, I'm not condoning their users to be treated like lemmings as this proposed ordinance appears to be doing. An ambulance might as well be permanently stationed at the intersection of Bloomfield and Silver Springs for all the business I predict it will get if this proposal becomes law.

Instead of waffling around the issue and attempting to regulate scooters, the Council should just bite the bullet and outlaw them.

But the council shouldn't stop there. What about bicycles? How can the city ban scooters from streets with speed limits greater than 35 mph while allowing traditional bikes to still use those roadways? This sounds like the type of legal fight the ACLU just loves to sink its teeth into. Can you say discrimination? The only safe course of action is to outlaw them too.

Because the anarchists who toodle around on their scooters will find other non-standard forms of transport to use, the council should also banish from our roadways riding lawn mowers, Segways, Razors, Motorblades, Rollercycles, 3-wheelers, 4-wheelers, unicycles, pogo sticks, horse-drawn carriages, horses, golf carts, horse-drawn golf carts, inline skates, outline skates, skateboards, those stupid tennis shoes with wheels on the bottom, shoes with giant springs, hovercraft rigged up using leaf blowers, the miniature motorbikes some Shriners like to ride in parades, gas power Big Wheels, and motorized bar stools.

We just can't take any chances regarding these malcontents.