The New York Scooter Club’s mission is to help New York-area scooter owners and enthusiasts share information, socialize, and plan group scooter rides and other events.

Our motto is: “If you have a Scooter, you’re in the Club!”

Our members ride all makes and models of scooters; modern “twist-n-go’s,” as well as vintage two-strokes. Vespas, Lambrettas, Aprilias and Stellas as well as Hondas, Buddys, Kymcos, SYMs, and Yamahas.

Everyone is welcome at our events. We meet every Wednesday evening at 7 pm for the “Wednesday Night Meetup” at the Brass Monkey in lower Manhattan (map). The best way to get involved is to just stop by, and we’ll introduce ourselves and make you feel right at home.

The rest of the time, you’ll find us on the New York Scooter Forum, planning rides, get-togethers and talking all things scooter-related (and not so scooter-related).

Explore the links on our web site for more information, then come over to the Brass Monkey or the Forum and say hello!

Until then… keep the shiny side up!

The Organizers of the New York Scooter Club

Many folks took pictures and videos of the weekend’s activities, here are a few links to start with and we’ll add more as they surface.

BlockParty Pix:
Brouhaha’s Shots, Herb’s Shots, Ken’s Shots, Theo’s Shots, Stephenie’s Shots, Tedd’s Shots, Kimboy’s Shots, Claudia’s Shots, Myles’ Shots.

BlockParty Videos:
Brouhaha’s Vids, Kimboy’s Vid.

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High Gas Prices Lead to U.S. Scooter Boom
By DESMOND BUTLER, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - With gas prices above $3 a gallon, software engineer Daniel Fry has been commuting to work over the Brooklyn Bridge in a car pool of sorts. It’s actually more like a convoy — of motor scooters.

“It’s fun to ride in a group,” said Fry, 28, who joins a group of riders for coffee early Friday mornings before commuting into Manhattan via scooter. “In a big mass of scooters people look out for you more.”

Fry is part of a growing community of scooter enthusiasts in New York and across the country who are taking to the streets in record numbers with gas prices so high. Fry fills up the 1.5-gallon gas tank of his scooter for under $5.

“The funniest thing is pulling into a gas station behind an SUV and seeing them pay 75 bucks,” he says.

Scooter riders are also mobilizing in ways never seen before. Riders are joining clubs, setting up Internet message boards, and even lobbying city governments for more friendly laws.

One club, the New York Scooter Club, meets Wednesday evenings at a bar in Manhattan. They discuss mechanics, the relative merits of classic metal-framed scooters vs. the newer synthetic models, and the simple joys of scooter travel.

After the gathering, the members mount up for an 8 p.m. ride around town. On weekends, they organize day trips out of the city on scooters, first popularized in the 1960s and ’70s by movies like Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” and The Who’s “Quadrophenia.”

A scooter boom has been under way over the last few years as the vehicles came back into fashion. Retail sales in the U.S. have shot up from 12,000 scooters in 1997 to 113,000 in 2005, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council, a promotional trade organization. But this spring, the boom has turned into a bonanza, with more and more people realizing that scooters can get up to 100 miles per gallon and can weave around traffic jams.

“The phone has been ringing and recently the calls begin with talk about gas prices,” says Aaron Peterson, manager of Vespa Soho, a Manhattan dealer of the most classic Italian scooter.

Sales at the Chicago-based Genuine Scooter Company, one of the country’s larger scooter dealers, which owns the popular Stella brand, have been doubling annually for the last three years, with even faster growth projected for this year, according to owner Philip McCaleb. The Stella gets about 90 miles per gallon.

“We are trying to combine fun and fuel economy and three-dollar gas is helping,” McCaleb said.

Dealers say high gas prices have attracted a whole different crowd from the usual fashionable set, who buy classic Italian models.

“I’m seeing a lot of people from blue-collar businesses, who are paying $100 to fill up their vans,” said Nick Mendizabal, owner of Brooklynbretta, a scooter dealership. “A lot of people who thought scooters were not so masculine are now asking, ‘How fast do they go?’ and `What’s the mileage?’”

* * *

“At the end of the day, it’s just fun riding a scooter around a city,” said Jonathan Faulhaber, who attends the New York Scooter Club meetings.

For the rest of the story, click here.
And here are some pictures on MSNBC.com.

Apparently, this was filmed in mid-2003 and for the NYC scooterists that were involved, it wasn’t as much fun as it seemed:

“Har! Virtually the entire NYC scooter scene made a nickel off that production. They must have had 30 or more scoots.”

“I walked off the set after the 2nd day of the shoot, and about 2 hours of sleep in that time. They were supposed to give us free vouchers for the hotel and raffle off one of the ET4’s. They lied. God that was a nightmare. Not worth the 2 seconds I can see myself in this commercial. Good thing I left too, cuz when they were transporting the scooters to AC, there were a bunch of damages that took forever to get compensated for.”

“Still waiting to be compensated for my long departed Italjet. Got home at 7AM from Atlantc City. Glad I didn’t have to go to work.”

And if you’re a fan of both, it almost certainly is.

As someone commented elsewhere:

There are a hundred subtle in-jokes: Note the German players are riding german scooters (If the resolution was better, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spaniards were on Motovespas and the French on AMCAs, if the resolution was better), the music (”Get a Bloomin’ Move On” by Quincy Jones) is from the original “The Italian Job,” about a heist exploiting the traffic jam during an Italy-England match in Milan. The shots of Beckham and the other british players merging into traffic with the French is right out of the “road to Brighton” scene in Quadrophenia.

Way to go, Adidas!

Thanks to The Scooter Scoop for discovering this.

The Chinese Pavilion - What we thought was going to be an entire hall dedicated to the new Chinese bikes on the market turned out to be a hotel meeting room full of Chinese manufacturers all looking for U.S. Distributors. There were still hundreds of booths in the regular show selling misc. Chinese bikes. It looked like the show organizers put all these guys together in one room because they didn’t have distributors in the U.S. and they were obviously not big spenders (most only had 10×10 booths). There were many different manufacturers / sellers with very little brand identity hawking bikes that were obviously identical to the ones in the next booth, the only change being a few stickers etc. We came to notice a trend among these booths, one associate in a suit and tie who only spoke Engrish learned from a script and a pretty girl who stayed seated or stood behind the bikes handing pamphlets to the suit. Communication was a definite problem. Stray from the script and your reward was a blank look and a pamphlet stuffed in your hand. There were a few bikes I saw that were interesting, but trying to get information about them proved impossible. Either we knew more about their product than they did, or they weren’t able to articulate and pass their info on to us. Either way, it was a failure.

The Freakshow- We all love to hear about how bad the Chinese stuff is because on some level we feel threatened and it comforts us to see them just not getting it right. The good news is they didn’t let us down. In the Chinese pavilion I found a Quad/Go-Cart type vehicle that was powered by a Chang Jiang 750cc Motor which is a well known clone of the pre-war BMW motor. This thing was a monstrosity, it had an individual gas tank for each of its 30mm carbs. The power leaves the motor in a drive shaft in typical BMW fashion, but rather than using that shaft and going into a standard differential they decided to install not one, but two jack shafts and run the heaviest chain I’ve ever seen between them. Way to take what should be a simple day at Junkyard Wars and make it unnecessarily complicated. Later in the show I saw at least 4 other companies pimping this same vehicle. We saw obvious disasters like logo stickers mounted to fork stanchions…that’s right the part of the fork that is supposed to be perfectly smooth and the fork seal travels over! We saw numerous scooters with 4 cycle motors that were fitted with 2 Cycle expansion chamber exhausts. One of the most entertaining Chinese booths of the show was put on by Moto-Fino, one Italian guy playing a Casio keyboard (concert at 6pm, no kidding) while the other American kid talked to people about their bikes…or tried to, he knew NOTHING about the bikes he was standing in front of. It became painfully obvious that despite the high booth cost and logistics issues of having a booth at the Dealer Expo most of these people couldn’t even be bothered to learn the names and basic facts about the bikes they were supposed to be representing.

What China is offering- They are all selling their own version of what appears to be 6 different bikes. It’s as though some government decree came down that said “you can put whatever components you want underneath, but from the outside it has to look like one of these”. Be careful though, even well known names like Schwinn are popping up on really lousy Chinese products, so they’re not beyond using an American company to shill for their stuff. Other attempts at name games like Yamasaki (yep, we didn’t make that up) and 18 different version of the “Honda Wings” logo may be a little less effective, but it still represents an underlying sneakiness that can’t be ignored.

The Catch- The Chinese level of visual uniformity makes it impossible to differentiate one bike from another. You’d think this would make it easy to order parts for the bikes once you figured out what each company called their version…well, we tried. It turns out the Handsome Boy, Z-Bike, Eagle 150, Panthera and Jouster all claim to use the exact same “Gy6 motor”. They all claim that their motor is either “Honda Design or Yamaha Design”. But, how can it be all three when it’s supposed to be the same? They’re all claiming to use the “common and easy to find parts for Gy6″, I’ve seen at least 5 different motors that claimed to be Gy6 that did not share any level of parts interchangeability. Simply put, they are lying. After talking to several Chinese parts suppliers they all admitted that the best they could do was get “pretty close” on a part. They couldn’t keep up with all the different manufacturers shipping bikes in from China these days. They did all assure me, if a part they sold me didn’t fit, they’d be more than happy to send me another, and another, and another. Basically, telling me regardless of what I paid for the part, their mark up was so obscene they could afford to ship me 4 more at no loss to them. Oh, and for the record, the GY6 motor that everyone is talking about was taken from Honda (without permission). It was available in the mid 80’s in the elite / spacey line of scooters and came in 50, 125, and 150cc sizes. Simply saying “It has a Gy6 motor” is NOT enough information when ordering or selling parts.

The Good Stuff - You knew there had to be something to give us hope.

Kymco - Kymco is attacking the U.S. market with what can only be described as an armada of new scooters. There are at least 6 entirely new models. They appear to be phasing out the venerable 50, 150 and 250cc People line and replacing it with the more angular and stealthy looking 50/4 stroke, 125cc, 200cc and 250cc People “S”. These are good looking bikes, but it’s a shame to see the end of the more traditional, vintage looking scooters. The U.S. is the only market that thinks vintage style scooters look cool, since we represent only a fraction of a percent of the world scooter market, don’t look for any manufacturers to cater their designs to the desires of the U.S. consumer. They are showing off their new 250 and 500cc XCiting scooters, both share the same platform and represent a nice step up from the already impressive albeit cramped Grand Vista. The XCiting scooters do represent a major shift for Kymco into the Big n’ Long world of scooters. Obviously Kymco was trying to keep their wheelbases on the short side which made their scooters the most nimble in traffic, these new bikes are definitely targeting the freeway commuter / traveler. This will be a major year in the U.S. for Kymco it’s obvious they are setting themselves up to be the largest distributor with the best selection in the U.S.

Genuine Scooter Company - Genuine unveiled two entirely new scooters that represent their embracing of the automatic scooter world. The first was the Black Cat (yes, the firework company) 49cc scooter. This is a small body style scooter that is just begging to be tweaked, tuned and ridden in hooligan fashion. Seeing that it’s an established design with an already huge aftermarket in tuning and accessories this bike should be a huge hit. Their second bike is the Buddy 50cc and 125cc scooter. This scooter is the answer to the folks who found the Stella and most other scooters were too tall, or wanted an automatic transmission. It’s got a very low seat height and a small chassis which claims to top out at over 60 mph.

Vento - Vento claims to be making a solid effort at embracing the US market. They claim their bikes are “Different and Better” than all of the other bikes coming in from China. They still aren’t fooling anyone with the whole “Made in America” line, yet, that’s the first thing that comes out of their mouth when you’re talking to a rep. They seem to be offering a large selection of bikes and scooters that are at least different from the “Standard 6″ models available by the rest of the Chinese manufacturers. Their quality appeared to be better than we’ve seen from them in the past. It looks like if there’s one Chinese company that may be able to claim a segment of the US scooter market (the bottom segment) it will be Vento. One solid tip would be to stop trying to impress us with 250cc cruiser motorcycles and focus more on the quality of the scooters. The U.S. demand for 250cc motorcycles isn’t that big, and the bikes are just caricatures of the huge displacement bikes they are imitating.

In Closing - I think we’ll continue to see a rise in the number of shady dealers selling shady product. Despite the 2 Stroke law going in to effect there were no shortage of Chinese importers willing to ship me a container of fifty 49cc 2 Stroke bikes with 2 crates of “misc. parts” to go with it, My cost $299 per scooter. They don’t care about our laws, our safety, or what happens to the scooters once they leave China. It’s become impossible to identify 90% of the available scooters out there by name. Most people were calling them “Vino-type Thing” or “Milano-Type Thing” by the end of the show. Sure, it’s a Chinese invasion, but it will sort itself out. Caveat Emptor has never been more important. If you’re willing to shop around, you can find a good scooter, Go Chinese at your own peril. Despite that fact that Piaggio, Honda, Kymco and all the other names we trust have most of their parts being made in China these days, they’ve set up strict quality control oversights that the other guys obviously aren’t bothering with.

It should be noted that two of the major sponsors for the ENTIRE DAMN SHOW were Cobra Powersports (the folks that bring you the TGB scooters) and TnG Scooters (CMSI). You couldn’t walk 10 feet without seeing their name on something, hell, they even sponsored the Food Vendors and the Live Band. Despite their both being what I would call premier sponsors who are obviou$ly trying hard to attract dealers to their brands, they were completely different in their approaches. Cobra / TGB had 2 Very large displays in what I would call excellent locations. They were well staffed and each had an excellent representation of what their company offered. In contrast I found it very difficult to even find TnG Scooters. Their booth was the minimum possible 10×10 sized unit and they had only 3 scooters present, the Baja 150, The Verona 150 and one of their employees used Venice LX. It was almost as though TnG was saying “We’re going to put our name everywhere, we want you to see our name, but not us”. It was a real let down.

Phil Waters
Pride Of Cleveland Scooters
2078 W. 25 St. Cleveland, Ohio 44113
216-737-0700 / Fax 216-737-0078
www.clevelandscooters.com

As we all know there will be no Gotham Rally ’06.

The New York Scooter Club is going to take this opportunity to organize a gathering of the local scootering scene and all willing participants.

The date will be June 10 & 11, 2006 and will be a weekend-long event.

Brass Monkey will be a base of operations throughout the event and there will always be a friendly group of scooterists there to meet and greet. The owners have agreed to open as early as we need and to clear some adjacent loading dock areas to accommodate an ongoing BBQ and scooter parking as well as some activities to be named later.

Several rides will be planned daily, will begin and end at the Monkey, and will be geared toward riders of varying skill levels and riding limitations.

Vendors will be invited to participate as it surely is in their interest to do so. No sponsorship of any kind is being sought although we are open to voluntary donations of give-away items. It is our intention that the local scooter shops simply see this as a way to introduce themselves and their products and services to new and potentially new riders in the area.

We strongly encourage any local clubs to take an active role in the planning and execution of Scooter Weekend NYC and invite them to sponsor and lead rides of their own with the full support of the event planning group.

This is NOT a New York Scooter Club event although we are working hard to see that it gets off the ground and is inclusive and fun for everyone involved.

These are the basics and while it sounds simple, there is a great deal of planning to do.

We need your help. If you feel this is something with which you’d like to get involved, please send an email to nyscooterclub AT gmail DOT COM with your contact information and we will set up a meeting describing the services we may call on you to carry out.

As you know, many hands make light work and based on the remarkable showing at last night’s planning meeting, we expect any appointed tasks to be of the “quick and easy” variety.

Thanks for taking the time to read this as it is the first “official” announcement on the subject. Much more information will follow as plans progress and we hope you can share with us what will inevitably be a fun weekend for everyone.

Johnny Cataneo,
NYSC President

Here is a link to the article. Excerpts:

[W]ith the zoom in sales, a social scene was born. There’s now an annual Gotham rally and scooter clubs like I Scoot NY, the New York Scooter Club, and the all girls group Donne Veloci meet weekly for group rides and often workshops on everything from maintenance to tips for smart winter riding.

John Cataneo, 36, bought his Vespa GT200 after moving to SoHo from Staten Island. Cataneo, who owns a plumbing and heating contracting business, founded the New York Scooter Club in the spring and acts as president.

Scooters, he says, are not only popular – they are populist. When Cataneo began riding, the New York scooter community was “cliquey” and comprised mostly of old guard vintage riders. He rode with them, but didn’t feel like one of them.

Cataneo started the new scooter club to create social space for the diverse band of new riders hitting the city streets. Membership grew from about 10 to about 70 in under 10 months.

“You get to meet people you wouldn’t otherwise,” he said. “I can’t imagine anything else that would bring such a diverse group together.”

Off-roads, a vibrant Internet community chats and trades information and snapshots via hordes of online forums and message boards like Gotham Scooter Forum or the New York Scooter forum and scooter-centric blogs like UrbanNerd.com, Katstan.net and Brad in the Big City.