Narrow track vehicles - the convergence of the car and the motorcycle

[Santa]

Welcome to the future in transportation technology. :o Very good video presentation. I stumbled on it while doing some research into "cheap" transportation and CVT(automatic transmission) touring scooters like the 80's style Honda Helix and beyond. My first reaction looking at pictures of the old Helix on CraigsList was like, "my God, that's one gay looking couch sled," coming from a more traditional motorcycle perspective. But I gotta say, this is a growing trend. More like a growing necessity... as more people get herded into urban environments worldwide.
There are boatloads of incredibly cheap scooters pouring into the US these days, and while some are often poorly built Chinese crap, some are also pretty decent clones of tried and true Jap technology. In just a few more years there will be a huge infrastructure for parts and service on these things. Anyway, it's an interesting phenomena. There's a lot of creative energy and monetary investment flowing into it.


http://youtu.be/5CAnq5DyNG0

[Glass]

Living in an asian city from a country mentioned in the video you could spend 2 hours of a morning to travel to work by car. Any expat exec working in asia is going to have a local driver. Often you get started in the morning get maybe 2 miles closer to the office, get out and walk to work and the driver would show up at the office with the car by about 10 - 10:30. Then you may be go to 1 meeting by car before returning back home, often with the same experience. Get so far in the car, then get out and walk. Have dinner on the way or get home an hour or more sooner than the car.

Motorcyles are becoming very popular here in Oz. No where near the numbers of asian cities. The scooters are the thing, $2K - $3K for a new one. Under 50CC no special license other than car. Over that capacity need a bike license. One thing about scooter riders is they appear to be immune from falling off. I see many youngsters riding them in shorts and singlets/t-shirt or a frock of some sort. A helment. But thats the extent of the safety gear. No protective footwear. Open face helmets. There are a lot of people who come off scooters who you never see their injuries. Apparently there are a lot of young girls who are now missing the lower part of their faces including their jaws. Rumourz is all I got.

At some point traffic make up will tip in favour of motorbikes/scoooters. They are already reworking the filtering laws because in many states it is illegal to filter through halted traffic to the front of the queue. In asia thats the whole point, if you have every sat at traffic lights and there are 200 motorbikes in front of the queue all rearing to go on the green.

[palani]

Dunno if a seat belt and shoulder harness are good ideas on bikes. I prefer to see leathers and a full coverage helmet.

http://i41.tinypic.com/14lu0s3.jpg