There are many ways where scooter riders can do their part in decarbonising the planet. The good news is just by owning a scooter you have already made a big improvement to your potential footprint as 80% of all car journeys are single person trips.
Yes, that’s right 80% of car journeys only have one occupant, so imaging if we converted all these journeys into scooter journeys, the reduction in emissions would be huge. So if you already own a scooter, well done you!
Our surveys have shown us that most scooter owning families also have a car. This makes a lot of sense for your two parent, 2 child household. These households are smart about their vehicle use and use the scooter short domestic one or two person travel, and use the car when they need to transport the two kids.
Not only do these families save on thousands of dollars on fuel, rego, holding and insurance costs, they definitely produce much lower emissions than other families with two cars for example.
If you own a scooter there are yet more efficiencies you can include to reduce your carbon footprint and most are quite simple to implement. These include
- Accelerate modestly
- Keep your top speed down as much as possible
- Keep your servicing/tune up to date, especially the air filter.
- Ensure you are using the most fuel efficient grade of fuel for your scooter (check with us about this if you’re unsure)
- Checking your tyre pressures helps reduce fuel consumption
- Not carrying extra unnecessary weight under your saddle or in your top box improves efficiency
- Ride and pillion rather than drive the car when possible, (even if it’s wet weather or winter time).
- Avoid tailgating which often makes you brake and accelerate much more often. Practice anticipation while riding to improve how smooth you can be.
- Consider owning a scooter with start/stop technology. These scooters, like the Piaggio Medley 150 or Aprilia SRGT125, will stop running while you are waiting for the lights to go green, and instantly restart with a simple twist of the throttle.
- Consider upgrading your old Euro 2 (green section emissions) scooter to our current and far more fuel efficient Euro 5 (dark blue) scooters. (see graph)
It is wonderful to see so many people doing what they can to decarbonise the planet. Electric scooters are only trickling into the market and prices are still quite high, so in the meantime, let’s reduce our emissions with the current machines as much as we can. Â Our kids will thank us for it.