The World's No.1 Scootering magazine

What you looking at?

Now, for those who are used to seeing a gallery of images from the Isle of Wight scooter rally on the magazine’s website (www.scootering.com), we apologise but I’ve simply not had the time to sort them out yet. Hopefully I’ll get them uploaded soon. Speaking of which, can someone please tell me when the Isle of Wight scooter rally became a scooter festival, or is that simply others misnaming the event?

Anyway, this month you’ll find reports from the Scooters Only run on Jersey, Woolacombe rally in the south west, plus loads of other events including the final round of the 2011 BSSO scooter racing season and the first Scooter Shootout sprint meeting. The shootout was a great success with some impressive speeds achieved (100mph+), so hopefully a repeat will be on the cards for next year.

We’ve also made space for the EU Demo ride on September 25, which meant we had to postpone our planned 10,000 miles road test report on the Suzuki Burgman scooter until the next issue. I must admit it’s been a love – hate relationship with the big Burger; I love using it as an alternative to a car and hate the thought of giving it back to Suzuki! I’m also proud of the mileage we’ve clocked up too. Not many magazines will do those sort of miles on a test bike, let alone a scooter!

Elsewhere we have some more gorgeous scooters to drool over, including a tidily updated Douglas Vespa and rare British Phoenix scooter. And in our Practical Scootering pages you’ll find everything you need to know about your nuts – honest!

Accident Statistics

I recently received a press release from RoSPA commenting on Road Casualty figures that were published by the Department of Transport on September 29. The figures showed that in total 1850 people were killed in reported road accidents in Great Britain during 2010, a reduction of 17% on the previous year’s figures. The numbers were broken down into types (cyclists killed was up 7% to 111, HGV occupants killed rose 100% to 28, and pedestrian deaths fell from 500 to 405 etc.), and from here I learned that motorcycle user deaths were down in 2010 by 15% from 472 to 403. It also reported that the number of people killed in accidents in which it was confirmed the driver was using a mobile phone increased from 15 in
2009 to 28 in 2010.

The kind people from RoSPA pointed me to the DfT website (www.dft.gov.uk/statistics) where you can view the report in full (there is a lot of it!), but one piece that did stick out was the fact that “failed to look properly” was the most frequently reported contributory factor for every vehicle type except motorcycles.
“Failed to judge other person’s path or speed” was the second most frequently reported factor for cars and goods vehicles.

Granted motorcycles didn’t come out this squeaky clean by any means (we’re apparently more likely to have “excess speed” as a contributory factor for example), it does suggest that despite car drivers failing to look out for us, and then even if they do see us failing to judge which direction we’re heading in, that deaths of motorcyclists was reportedly down in 2010. Now that to me sounds like Governments and Eurocrats need to be training car drivers to improve their skills, rather than forcing new rules and regulations onto motorcyclists and scooterists. What do you think?

Ride safe,

Andy