I don’t remember when I noticed that all the city kids seemed to be on scooters; there were years in my 20s when I don’t think I noticed that there were kids in New York City at all. But when I noticed them, it made instant sense—on scooters, kids could move as fast as grownups could walk and families could get places at a reasonable pace.
My kid, nearly 5, isn’t great at scooting. She’s had the scooter (a Buy-Nothing find, with “GUS” written across the nose in sharpie), since she was about 2, but she never really figured out the momentum part, and when we took it out it was for goofing around, not going anywhere. She’s better at it now, but she’s also a better walker, and she likes to collect acorns and fallen leaves and count the paving stones around tree pits and the scooter isn’t really conducive to those sorts of activities.
And that’s ok with me, because every time we take the scooter out, I end up carrying it as much as M rides it. It’s probably a ratio of 3 parts scooting to one part parent shlepping. She gets tired, or bored, or wants to pick up a stick, and fine, I’ll carry it for you. I’m not alone, some parents have perfected the art of carrying the scooter on stroller (I haven’t figured out how to do this elegantly) and seem to go through their days expecting to lug it around.
For the kids who are good scooters though, it really is a means of transportation, and I’m annoyed that doesn’t seem to be taken very seriously. It seems hard to lock up a scooter and there isn’t a place at school to store it. Every day after school drop off, I see parents carrying scooters back home; the other morning I inadvertently followed a dad around the supermarket who had a micro mini rakishly draped over his shoulder. It sucks that we have this took that gives kids speed and endurance, lets them use city sidewalks to get to the places they need to go, and yet we treat it only like a toy. There are a lot of ways that kids are excluded from urban spaces because they’re too small, too codependent, too noisy, but the scooter is sort of like a booster seat for walking—it raises them up to a more grownup speed so they can make the distance manageable. Let’s give the scooter the consideration it deserves.
Object permanence rating: This is hard — I think 10/10 for scooters in general, there will always be kids using them because they fill a real need. But closer to 3/10 for any individual kid; scooters fit in a liminal space between strollers and longer legs, and then make way for all the other modes that come after like skateboards and bikes.