I had heard about those. I was making a bit of a joke though. They call these things "rascal scooters" where I'm from: Geez. The attitudes that motorists have about motorcyclists is really terrible here. Of course, some of that might be a little bit attributable to the douchebro attitude of many motorcyclists in this country too. All I can say from personal experience is, getting run off the road on a bike by a huge bus is a pretty pants-shitting experience that I think a lot of drivers of larger vehicles might benefit from.Piaggio does make freeway-capable scooters, but I think I'd rather have a little more geometry to my suspension if we're going to make that sort of rate.
I had to push my KLR to 95 in order to escape a homocidal semi driver and it was an "engines canna take much more'o'this captain" experience.
It's well-earned, though. There are a lot of terrible motorcyclists. I ride in LA and I can say with no quaver in my voice that every paranoid angelino who fears for my safety while I commute has a well-founded basis for that fear based on watching my compatriots demonstrate the low value they assign their own survival. It doesn't have to be that way, but it is. The stories I could tell…
I still remember as a youth what it was like to travel in a car and be able to see the highway and horizon before you, even though the roads were filled with other cars. I remember when SUV's started becoming a "thing" in the nineties because of the number of times I was suddenly found myself strikingly aware of the fact that I was sitting in traffic, just looking at a wall of steel rising up in front of me. To this day I still resent SUVs on that level. They just block too much stuff.
I wanted that thing to be awesome. I really did. Instead we got a Razor with the wheels on sideways and a Celeron to keep it from tipping over. I'm ungainly as fuck on my longboard. I am not a graceful man. But even I look down my nose at the German tourists on their "people movers."