Honolulu Lite
Is there a secret organization of personal injury lawyers who invent things like tennis shoes with little wheels that pop out of the soles and shoes designed with an arch cut in the sole so that wearers can attempt to slide down stairway handrails? Kids are scootering to disaster
Is this secret organization somehow responsible for the manufacture of products that are so obviously dangerous to the user that there is no way that any normal company would be involved?
I was wondering that recently as I drove along at 25 mph in my pickup truck and tailgating me was a kid, maybe 11 or 12 years old, on a motorized stand-up scooter.
The kid had picked up my tail after cutting through a three-way intersection without stopping, going the wrong way in oncoming traffic, and then falling in behind me like an F-18 getting ready to shoot down a bogie. Except in this case, the bogie, my truck, weighed about 4,000 pounds and the kid (and his scooter) might have weighed in at 92.
If a cat jumped out in front of my truck, or another car shot out or I had to stop suddenly for any reason, the kid was going to make a mess against my steel-reinforced tailgate.
Motorized scooters have appeared around the island like a swarm of gas-engine powered mosquitoes. They are driven by young boys blissfully unaware of traffic laws in general and the laws of physics specifically.
I attempted to tell my young offender that he was way out of his weight class in a showdown between a truck and scooter, and explain what happens when two moving objects of grossly uneven weights attempt to occupy the same coordinate in a spatial plane but all I got out was, "Hey, kid . . ." before he whipped around and scootered away.
What are these motorized scooters suddenly doing on the roads? Albert Young, CEO of Scooter Alley, a business that sells them, says they aren't supposed to be there. It's illegal for kids to ride on the streets. But they do anyway.
"I only sell to parents," he said. He urges the kids to ride responsibly, which, I suspect, is like urging kids to eat vegetables and not pick their noses.
Why parents are letting the little blighters risk their lives, Young doesn't get. At least you'd think they'd want to protect the machines, which cost $400 to $700 each.
Jayne Kim, who with her husband owns Eki Cyclery, doesn't want scooter road kill on her conscience and so refuses to sell the blasted things. "They seem awfully dangerous," she says, in a fit of understatement. Another reason she won't sell them is that she's afraid that if a kid gets hurt or killed, she'd be the one sued silly.
That's too bad. The people who need to be sued silly are the dumb parents willing to sacrifice their kids on altars of asphalt. Where's the secret organization of lawyers willing to sue these nitwits?
Alo-Ha! Friday compiles odd bits of news from Hawaii
and the world to get your weekend off to an entertaining start.
Charles Memminger also writes Honolulu Lite Mondays,
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Honolulu 96813, phone 235-6490 or e-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
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