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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Scooting into
trouble on scootersThe parent of any kid caught riding an illegal motorized scooter on a public roadway should be the one held legally responsible for the child's dangerous behavior.
That's what I was thinking as a police officer peeled off the 13th warning ticket from his pad and handed it to me, shortly after he nabbed me driving my completely illegal "minibike" motor scooter down Aiea Heights Drive in 1970. It had been a stone cold bust. All that was missing was the background music. ("What you gonna do when they come for you? Bad boys, bad boys.")
I had been racing down the wrong side of the road to my house, trying to get to my driveway before the car coming up the hill reached me. I made it to the drive with time to spare. Time, in fact, to realize that the car coming up the hill was a police car. The cruiser pulled in. The cop got out, shaking his head. Was I an idiot? he asked. The annoying question had been coming up with surprising frequency since I had turned 16.
My mute response must have told him I just might be an idiot, and thus, deserved some sympathy. Were he to give me a ticket for every violation I had just committed, the fines would run in the thousands of dollars: unlicensed vehicle, unlicensed driver, no head light, no brake lights, driving on the wrong side of the road, speeding ... The list and the warning tickets went on and on.
He stopped at 13, mainly because that's when he ran out of tickets. This really wasn't fair, I thought. Didn't my dad know better than to let me buy the blasted bike, even if I was using my own money? Didn't he know I'd be riding it on the roads? All I remember from that brush with the law -- my first -- was that I was extremely disappointed in my old man. I don't think I had been so disappointed in him since my brother and I had almost derailed a train in Georgia after putting large chunks of granite on the tracks and a railroad detective gave my dad a good talking-to.
TODAY, WE STILL haven't managed to figure out whom to hold responsible for kids using motorized scooters on the roads and sidewalks. Someone less sensitive than myself would recommend letting the youngsters tear along the highways unhindered on scooters and let evolution take its course. But a semicivilized society can't simply let nature take its course if there is money to be made imposing hefty fines. So the City Council is banning the stand-up scooters from roadways, while the state Legislature has approved new rules allowing the $5,000 Segway computerized scooters on sidewalks and bike paths.
The message delivered by these actions is ... huh? Actually, the message is that if parents will not take responsibility for their idiot children illegally riding motorized vehicles all over creation, the government will at least make some money off it. And, by the way, if Mom and Pop want to buy a really cool scooter for $5,000, they can ride it anywhere they want, as long as they don't let their kids ride it.
Passing laws to allow rich grown-ups to ride scooters on sidewalks while at the same time keeping kids from doing the same thing may seem unfair, but there's a certain logic to it. It is a logic one learns with age. When I was 16, I thought parents should pay for their kids' mistakes. I also thought that kids should have a lot more fun than grownups. What an idiot.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com