As I sat performing my chemistry lab titration, hair plastered with sweat and hands shaking, I enviously eyed the other students around me. They appeared calm. They had not run up three flights of stairs. They had not panted tardy apologies to the teaching fellow. When class ended, they’d search the hallways for gleaming metallic bodies—skateboards, bikes, scooters. In a flash, they mounted. Outside, while I lingered at the crosswalk, my classmates zipped past me. By the time the light turned green, they were long gone. I began to consider an alternate universe in which I owned a scooter. The more I thought about it, the more I reveled in it.
Scooters are everywhere at Yale. I have seen six-foot-plus basketball players and chemistry students alike coasting along on them. In 2023, Yale Facilities banned electric scooters, among other electronic micro-mobility devices, citing the risk of lithium-ion battery fires. But with e-scooters formally banned, kick scooters still remain our college’s guilt-free, childish pleasure. Popular among athletes, these vehicles allow hurried Yale students to race down the sloping New Haven streets.
Jackson St. Aubyn ’27, an offensive lineman on Yale’s football team, explained that wheeled vehicles are enticing to him and his teammates after a long practice. “My legs were just always so tired. I just didn’t want to walk up Science Hill or all my classes, I was just always sore,” he said.
“Obviously, scooters are for athletes,” kick scooter-owner Annie Chian ’28 insisted. Annie is not a college athlete, but touted the Yale stereotype: “I only take my scooter to [rock] climbing practice…because it’s the one commitment I have in my life that makes me feel like an athlete.” She recalled scooting to climbing practice once with a friend, who happened to have the same make and model. A pas de deux of scooters, she called it.
Still, scootering is a fraught sport: Annie had cautionary tales of a friend’s scooter breaking into pieces mid-street, leaving its rider “totally cut up” on asphalt. Annie’s roommate (with whom she shares the scooter) once tumbled forward over the handlebars, subsequently “making out with the pavement.”
Warned by Annie’s tales but undeterred, I was determined to get to the bottom of this scooter phenomenon at Yale, the only way I could—by getting a scooter myself.
***
In the foreword of the 1961 children’s handbook Scooters! by Michael and Eric Dregni, Robert Ammon explains that documenting the history of the motorscooter was “a difficult and often thankless task. Difficult, not so much because the threads in the web of history are lost in the mists of golden time, but more often because no one gives a hoot.”
Eighty years later, in search of a human-powered vehicle expert to field my questions, I visited the Benjamin Franklin College Justa Sanchez Bike Shop, run by both paid college aides and student volunteers (bikes and scooters are, after all, anatomically and practically second cousins).
That day, the shop was manned by Benjamin Franklin College Fellow Kyle Sirianno, who previously worked as a refrigerant specialist for the Yale Health and Safety Department. He wore a mechanic’s apron and ambled around in clip-on cycling shoes, throwing out words like “axel,” “thread body,” and “dropouts.” Kyle spoke nostalgically of the cyclist-friendly 50s and 60s (an era he was, unfortunately, unable to witness himself on account of not being alive) and the injustices of our car-centric society.
“There is one feud, and it’s between people moving themselves through shared spaces … and cars,” says Kyle. According to him, the David-and-Goliath-esque disparity between the “3,000-pound metal cages” and pedestrians has become an abhorrent inequality.
To Kyle, scooters have the potential to “fill this weird third gap.” “Well, I don’t want to run to class, but I don’t feel safe riding my bike on the street,” he explained. “I can’t ride my bike on the sidewalk because it’s impractical and also illegal.”
Yet Kyle still expressed strong reservations about scooters. “There is no way to look dignified on a scooter. Like, you see people on a bike, they just got class, right? There’s just no way to, like, just scoot along and look cool on a scooter.”
Sheepishly, I thanked him for his time and made my way back to my dorm.
***
There was another hurdle I needed to surpass before getting on the scooter: breaking the news to my parents.
At 8 years old, I was a devoted backyard scooterist. I rode my red-rimmed Razor in my tiny Los Angeles backyard. It wasn’t much fun, going in circles and feeling my spine rattle over uneven tiles. I tried skating down the slanted driveway for a smoother ride, but I would end up speeding by too fast for my parents to feel secure.
Eventually, I outgrew the red Razor scooter and retired it to the unofficial “junk” corner of the yard. Color fading, wheels rusting, and the foam handles hardening and cracking, it disappeared from my memory.
When I called up my father one Sunday morning to ask what he thought about scooters, his grimace was unmistakable. “Well…” I said slowly, “I’m thinking of getting one. It’s purely for research. For an article I’m writing. About scooters.”
“What’s wrong with walking?” My mother poked her head into the frame. They grilled me for the next half hour: What about momentum? Energy conservation? How much faster is it, really?
My parents, in agreement, are an unarguable, unbreakable force. There was no use pleading for parental permission. I have to run, I told them. Before I hung up, my mom warned me to watch out for the road—it’s always lup lup dup dup, Cantonese for lumpy-bumpy.
I mulled over it some more. My mom’s concerns were not unfounded. In New Haven, there have been a handful of fatal accidents involving scooters, including a 2023 incident involving a University of New Haven graduate student and another two-scooter collision in 2024, resulting in the death of one rider.
The next day, I received a WhatsApp message from my mom. The article link: “Cal Student still critical after crash, GoFundMe underway.” Her caption: “Wear a helmet!”
***
In January, I discovered that an acquaintance was offering her scooter for forty-five dollars—a steal!
We met up for lunch. Emily Chang ’28 held the folded scooter as we sat at the end of a long table. It had red wheels the diameter of large cookies and was emblazoned with the Razor logo. She explained that her first semester schedule had only a fifteen-minute slot for a twenty-minute walk. Determined to arrive at class on time, she invested in a Walmart scooter. The scooter cost roughly eighty dollars. However, between Emily and her roommate, the scooter was brought out a mere total of five times that semester.
“I’m having second thoughts about buying it,” I confessed, stirring my soup. I decided on an arrangement: I would pay her fifteen dollars upfront to use the vehicle for one week. If I changed my mind, I would return it; if I fell in love with life on two wheels, I would pay the remaining thirty. We shook on our deal, and I walked out holding the brand new scooter.
That day, under a winter sun, I took note of my first ride across Yale’s stone-tiled paths.
The rocky floor jolted me about. Passersby blurred. My bangs floated like a mane around my cold-rouged cheeks. Icy gales forced my fingers into a raptorial grasp around the handlebars.
I’ve joined the club, I whispered to the wind.
A woman immersed in her phone suddenly swerved into my trajectory.
“On your left!” I screamed.
In the days following, I felt brazenly aware of my surroundings. My senses were heightened and my perceptions piqued. Minor inclines elicited sweat, while fractionally downward tilts made rides feel joyously carefree.
Yet, there were drawbacks. Maneuvering through doorways and tight corners was a debacle. The act of scooting itself was, to my chagrin, less effortless than certain athletes made it seem. I’m rather short, and kicking off the ground required substantial effort. Rather than the serendipitous gliding I envisioned myself undertaking, scooting more resembles a constant one-legged pistol squat.
I eventually met my tipping point when I fell off my ride in the middle of College Street. The front wheel got stuck in a rut, and the rest of me, carried by forward momentum, continued forward onto the asphalt. A single passerby stopped and asked if I needed help. Slightly embarrassed and still in shock, I exhaled, “Fine!” and carried my scooter away.
The incident barely drew blood, but I decided one instance of public humiliation was more than enough. I messaged Emily that I was ready to return the scooter. That evening, I parked the salt-studded, slightly scratched-up scooter into the Timothy Dwight bike rack.
But, as Greek tragedies go, fate was determined to drag me through further trials. The scooter disappeared. Stolen, more precisely. My initial shock gave way to anger, then a hopeless irony. I had heard of the notorious Yale bike thieves; never would I have imagined a person so petty as to steal a used scooter.
I explained the situation and paid Emily back thirty dollars.
If anything, I’ve learned that being on two wheels is an exercise in humility. I’m short forty-five dollars and limping with a bull’s-eye-shaped bruise on each knee. I hope whoever is now in possession of the scooter will feel as keenly aware of their surroundings as I did. To some bitter end, I hope they, too, encounter a rut in the road. While my days of scootering have ceased, I still treasure the fractional joys afforded by minutes saved: finding myself higher in the coffee shop queue, texting a lunch date “I’ll wait for you in the common room,” or matching the speed of a low-flying bird. My world grew larger as the time spent commuting grew shorter.
Oh wheels… I miss them. Perhaps I’ll pay Kyle another visit. This time, for a bike.
-Michelle So is a first-year in Timothy Dwight College.
Illustrations by Alicia Gan.