by Jack Lee
Is this just another touchy-feely experiment or a smart way to maximize police patrol effectiveness? It remains to be seen, but one thing I know from being a long time motorcycle rider is this: When you’re riding anything on two wheels, especially something motorized, you have to really focus on where you’re going, this doesn’t make for the best patrol tactic where you like to really look around. But, with this vehicle you need to watch whats ahead very carefully because scooters such as these electric types have a bad combination of a short turn radius (very sensitive steering) and small wheels (easy to slide and skid) and this makes them inheirently more unstable and thus more dangerous than a standard bicyle. A scooter is about one notch above a skate board when it comes to operator injuries.
These scooters may have an operating cost of a penny per mile, but what is the cost when an officer’s knee is blown out by a fall or he suffers any number of other potential injuries because of the unstable scooter? I would have kept the bicycles as being more cost effective. They can do everything the scooters can do and do it cheaper and safer, but thats just my opinion, like I said time will tell who was right. But, for now I am thinking this was probably a bad idea.