Winter finally came upon us with a vengeance! Temps have been between highs of 14 and lows around -8 or -9 for more than a week now. All the neighborhood streets are snow covered and the others have a lot of salt and sand on them. Looks like it'll be awhile before I'm riding again.

Lots of time to read and think about scootering. Since I'm writing a scooter specific street survival page, I'm sorting through my own experiences, reading safe riding manuals written for motorcycles, and thinking about the differences between riding a motorcycle or a scooter safely. Some of the ways they're either the same or different, are very obvious. They're similiar in that over a certain size, they're both legally motorcycles, and they both function as motorcycles when it comes to steering, countersteering, leaning to go through corners, and how weight transfer from side to side, as well as transfer between front and back affects the steering and handling. Tire size, wheelbase, step through design and the fact that scooters have CVTs instead of multi-speed foot operated transmissions are obvious design differences. The obvious performance differences between most motor scooters and most motorcycles are that motorcycles usually have more speed and acceleration.

I knew that scooterists needed different strategies for dealing with some situations, because of the difference in speed and acceleration alone. The more I think about how scooters work vs what works on a motorcycle, I'm realizing that completely different responses to many traffic related dangers may be called for on a scooter, and that road hazards that could often be ignored on a motorcycle would drop many scooters.

Because some of what I'll be covering is uncharted territory, when it comes to exploring scooter specific responses and strategies, I'm expecting the safe scootering project to take quite awhile to complete... if indeed I ever get to the point where I feel it's complete. I also anticipate that there will be many revisions of specific safe riding tips after they've been published, as I discover better ways of dealing with some dangers and add alternative strategies for others, realizing that there are a number of possibilities for similiar scenarios because of different elements that might be present.