Across the street from our house is a duplex. In one half of this duplex lives a young man - I am guessing he is a daytime college student living at home, or perhaps a senior in high school - and his mother.
Said young man has purchased one of those mini motorbike scooters. It is bright red and appropriately sized for my four year old. He has a friend who has a “homemade” scooter, which appears to be a regular stand-up-and-push-with-your-feet scooter with a lawnmower engine attached to it and a round gasoline tank on top. Needless to say, they look especially studly when they ride them, with their knees up around their ears or sitting on the gasoline tank.
The two of them and their other friends are obsessed with these scooters. They race them up…and down…and up…and down…and up…and down… my street… ALL…FUCKING…AFTERNOON, from about 3 PM until well past dark. While the scooters are being raced, the rest of the friends hang out in the front yard/driveway and smoke, waiting for their turn.
It sounds like hyper dueling lawnmowers on crack, or a bunch (herd? flock? gaggle? swarm!) of very loud, very persistent bees. I feel like I live on a gocart track. I can hear them very clearly, even inside my house with windows shut and the AC on.
After about a month of this, yesterday I finally got fed up. I was having a terrible day and the noise had woken the baby up from her nap. I called the police department to file a complaint. They sent a squad car out to drive up and down the street a couple of times. It made no difference - if anything they rode them more than usual yesterday. The dispatcher said that if you aren’t licensed, it is illegal to ride them in the street. I suppose there is a chance that the cops stopped them somewhere in the neighborhood and that they are licensed, but somehow I think either the police didn’t catch them in the act or that they got called away to something more important.
So now I get to sit and listen to them buzz their way up and down, up and down, for the rest of the summer. I can only hope they don’t keep riding them (or replace them with something more annoying) once it starts to snow, and that I don’t go insane before then…
We have a hoard of those little things buzzing up and down the streets.
I fear that one day that one of those young men will run smack into another vehicle. Which will start the town into some frenzy to make the little buzzy bikes illegal. Oh joy.
I live out in the woods.
The clown a couple of hundred yards away that plays C&W outside loudly for some damn reason is annoying. I’ve thought of getting his phone number from the criss cross directory and calling him about four in the morning to thank him for playing music for everyone.
Same thing for the bikes that morons drive around and around and around if I can see where they live.
They’re all the rage in the projects by my house. Seems to me, street cred is hard to come by when you’re squatted 3 inches off the ground, travelling 15 MPH, leaving the sound of a fart in your wake.
I don’t get these things. When I was in my mid-teens, if I was caught riding my mini-bike in the middle of no where, you bet the cops would be there to tell me so. These days, these little punks ride everywhere, and it’s legal? WTF? Is it even legal? Damn whippersnappers.
Woah, hill o beans, you sure you don’t live in my neighborhood in ohio?
These things are a completely new phenomenon to me. For a while I thought the kid down the street stole his little brother’s bike or something. The same kid who tooled around the block on his lawn mower.
Now there’s 3 of those bikes. Plus the lawn mower and the other kid’s dirt bike. And that other mutation of a motorized 2-wheeler.
The noise doesn’t bother me so much, since they don’t ride down my street. but they make me nervous to drive around, and I hate running into those kids every day when I’m walking the dog.
But I’d be seriously pissed if they were ripping down my street, not the street over. Because those things are LOUD. I am seriously impressed that the folks on the street they DO go down have not called the cops.
You’ve got it easy. There’s a store that sells the damn things about two blocks from my apartment.
Needless to say they’re constantly around driving me nuts. There is a little convenience store next to them and the employees are nervous wrecks from listening to the noise all day.
There is a house just behind me with those stupid bikes. Sounds like the same thing the OP talked about. They hang out and take turns ALL DAY LONG.
Part of me doesn’t mind. It’s just kids stuff. Yeah, they look STUPID buzzing around on those things (I’m pretty sure my generation would have beat the shit out of you for looking that dumb) but it’s fun for them.
The other part of me is pissed because they whip around corners and don’t follow the rules of the road. I’ve almost hit them a few times turning corners. They come out of nowhere at 20mph and are so low to the ground they’re quite hard to see. I REALLY don’t want to end up with one of these kids dead, stuck in my grill like a giant bug.
After a couple of weeks I just decided to call the cops everytime I see them break a road law - which is everytime they’re out there. I called everyday for 3 weeks straight. I know others called as well because sometimes dispatch would say “did you already call us today?”
Theres a couple of these motherfuckers across the street from me too. They zip up and down the street for hours at a time. I’m about ready to go out and close line the little fuckers. They don’t even go THAT fast. They look fucking ridiculous. They don’t do any tricks or any thing. They just drive back and forth and back and forth again and again. How safe can those things be? Isn’t there some noise ordinance or something that these things are breaking? Can I just sit out on my porch and rev my chainsaw or weed wacker all day long?
I’m rather surprised that these things don’t crash that often. I’m from Worcester where these bikes first caught on, and there are probably over 1,000 of them running around. For some reason, however, there haven’t been any recorded serious injuries, and it would be a safe bet that if any occured, the paper would be all over it. I’ve also been asked to put a 250-cc engine in one - I declined on the grounds that it would then do over 100 miles per hour. Perhaps that was part of the point…
Anyway, I’m just wondering if they’ll graduate to riding real motorcycles, or whether this is just a phase. They’ll be safer riders on the big machines if they learn on the little ones first.
I’m not sure if the OP means motorized scooters as in ‘like a thin skateboard with handles to hold while standing on it’ or the pocket rocket ‘looks like a real motorcycle only much smaller’ variety.
Here in Philadelphia, complaints by numerous people, as well as police, have gotten the mayor and city council to promise to start passing laws restricting pocket rockets. I believe the delay is due only to arguing over proper penalties, and making sure that exceptions allow motorized wheelchairs, some bizarre city maintenance vehicles, and other such things without providing loopholes for modified pocket rockets.
Actually, the boys across the street have one of each. Although they sit on the thin skateboard with handles one…I think because they modified it themselves, so the gas tank is the seat.
I am wondering when there will be laws here as well. I know there have been several articles in our small local paper discussing them, and even a short article in our city newsletter about how you have to be licensed to ride them.
Smartini I think that every time they mention the term. ‘It was an honest mistake. She said she wanted to see my pocket rocket. Not being familiar with mini-bikes, I misunderstood. I plead not guilty to the charge of indecent exposure.’
The term gives me hope though. Here, McGreevy is local news. So is a senator whose name has come to mean something else. I hope for the day one of the staff of a local news program announces “Coming up, more details in McGreevy’s affair, a ban on pocket rockets, and a visit to Santorum headquarters”
