Scooter Blues

You would think someone riding a praying mantis-like vehicle the color of a strawberry milk shake—in glaring daylight, no less—could make it through workday traffic without cheating death. Not in Nashville, where rising gas prices and the attendant popularity of pump-friendly scooters are creating all new hybrids of traffic hazards and road rage.

Last July, Jan Morrison was driving home from her job at a PR firm in Green Hills. It was 5:50 p.m. on a bright, hot summer day when she reached her East Nashville neighborhood. Cruising down Meridian Street on her blazing pink Buddy scooter at about 30 mph, she approached an intersection. She'd taken this particular route at this particular time often. The cross streets had stop signs, and having right of way made her feel safer.

When she saw a dark-green sedan approaching from the right, it appeared to be slowing down. But as she neared the intersection with every intention of sailing legally through it, she realized the car wasn't stopping. It was rolling right on through.

"I knew I had only two options," says the 27-year-old by phone. "One was to not slam on my brakes, and run directly into the driver's side door. The other was to slam on my brakes and see where it got me."

Scooters use hand brakes to slow down, and after riding for two years, Morrison knew grabbing them too hard could result in the front wheel locking up or the bike flipping. So she braced herself and squeezed. The scooter buckled, hurling her onto her left side. She skidded along the pavement with only a white long-sleeved Oxford and jeans between her and the steaming asphalt. She thudded to a stop, her head stopping directly at the nose of the other car, just as the sedan screeched to a halt.

The story didn't make headlines. If the car had gone two feet farther, it would have. But when a van on Main Street failed to yield a few weeks ago, smashing into musician Will Hoge on his scooter and landing him in critical condition at Vanderbilt, news stations perked up. Overnight, Hoge became something of a local poster boy for scooter awareness.

Interviewed at the scene by Channel 5, Sgt. Bob Sheffield summed up the dilemma scooter and motorcycle riders face every time they buzz into traffic. "I guess the burden of safety is on the motorcycle rider [or] scooter rider," he said. "They are in, I mean, on a much smaller vehicle and, you know, a lot harder for folks in passenger vehicles to observe them."

The comment drew ire on message boards and blogs around town immediately. Local blogger The Musician and the Geek fumed at what she described as a "shining example of tactlessness."

"Too bad Will's thoughtless actions as the 'smaller vehicle' nearly cost him his life!" a post from Aug. 21 read. "Since the 'burden of safety is on the...scooter rider,' I guess it's his own fault that he hit the side of a van!"

But Metro Police Dept. spokesperson Kris Mumford insists Sheffield's message was purely educational. "He simply wanted to say it is important for people on scooters and motorcycles to be aware that they aren't as visible," Mumford says. "It was not his intention at all in any way to blame Mr. Hoge."

That didn't appease scooter riders around town, whose numbers are soaring in step with a national trend toward ditching the gas guzzler for the fuel sipper. They say the subtext is nothing new. They're used to getting cut off, honked at, or worse—ignored.

The risk hasn't stopped Nashvillians from buying scooters in large numbers. Dealers like East Side Scooters on Gallatin Road said they've sold more scooters this month than all of last year. "The demand this year has been insane," says co-owner Josephine Duer. She explains that Nashville's terrain allows scooters, meant on average for maximum speeds of 55 mph, plenty of surface streets to avoid the interstates. "Nashville is laid out in such a way that you don't have to hit major streets to get across town," she says.

And they're not just selling to trendy 20-somethings or kids. "When we first opened, I pictured having a niche group like that, but it's everybody buying them," Duer says. "We've had doctors, lawyers, musicians, men, women, everybody. I've had a couple guys come in who wanted to buy motorcycles and their wives were like, 'No way.' So they came in to get a scooter."

As it turns out, though, scooters are just as susceptible to sideswiping as cycles, which raises the question: Why do many drivers fail to register a brightly colored anomaly inserted into their environment? A term called "change blindness" partially explains it.

"People have difficulty detecting visual changes in their environment—salient changes you think people would find easily noticeable," says Vanderbilt psychologist Dan Levin, whose research focuses on change blindness in natural environments. "There's an enormous amount of info out there, and to think clearly we have to select little bits of it. What we select is generally a reflection of what's important. But not always."