2007 Archives: Vespas: One Eco-Friendly Ride
Eco-friendly or not, a Vespa is probably not the most appropriate means of transport for most moms, what with our passle of pint-sizers trailing behind. (Although we did see an entire five-person family riding a scooter in Mexico, which was certainly green but didn’t seem entirely safe, especially with the toddler balancing on the handles.) But oh how we pine for the days when we could hop on a single-person vehicle and ride off into the sunset—or, better yet, cling winsomely to the waist of the driver as our long tresses blow fetchingly in the wind from under our safe-yet-stylish helmet. The Vespa, with its Italian pedigree and sleek styling, is really the only scooter worth pining for.
Now Vespa ups the ante with a green rephrasing of its original hipster message by crunching the numbers and coming up with some pretty convincing factoids (if you don’t have rugrats and still have enough hair left to let it blow in the wind).
Simply put: If Americans traveled just 10 percent of the time on scooters rather than in cars, we would consume 14 million gallons less fuel and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 324 million pounds per day. Not to mention the reduction in traffic congestion, which, according to a recently released report from the Texas Transportation Institute, causes us to travel 4.2 billion more hours and purchase an additional 2.9 billion gallons of fuel worth $78 billion each year. Whew! All that to sit in traffic.
To encourage us burgeoning greensters to consider the Vespa as an alternate mode of transportation, the company is sponsoring a contest in which the best video wins a Vespa GTS. We applaud the competition, but seriously don’t think anyone can beat the “Vespa Vespa” music video submitted by RexGT200, who manages to rhyme “phenomenal” and “Vespanomical” and wrote a song so catchy we’ve been humming it all darned day. To our kids. Sigh.
Vespas are very eco friendly and they are great to have during the summer.