Effects of fuel price hikes turn from ice-cream trucks to scooter death

Last Monday’s Pioneer Press cover featured a sweet take on the effects of high oil prices with the tale of an ice-cream truck business struggling to pay for gas. Stories about ice cream trucks and other unusual forms of transport — from unicycles to scooters — serve to distract or inspire weary news consumers saddled with budget-sapping cars and SUVs.

The ice-cream truck angle on the oil price crisis had an early flurry in May and the first weeks of June in St. Louis; Columbus, Ohio; and Greensboro, N.C. But the PiPress story was the first in a torrent of reports last week on ice-cream truck woes in Worcester, Mass.; Kansas City, Mo.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; and Connecticut.

A boom in scooter sales provided a light look by Minnesota Public Radio last month at how gas prices are hitting home. But a fatal scooter crash last Tuesday signaled a downside to the increased variety of wheels on the road. Tommy Earl White, 21, of St. Louis Park died at the corner of Malcolm and University avenues SE in Minneapolis (memorial pictured).

“Stay the hell away from trucks” is advice Bob Hedstrom gave customers during the seven years he sold scooters out of an old building on a dusty industrial back road in Minneapolis. Before relocating last October to South Minneapolis to make way for a University of Minnesota expansion, Scooterville stood at the edge of U. of M. hegemony, where Stadium Village meets the Southeast Minneapolis Industrial Area — a place traversed by so many trucks it’s known by the acronym SEMI.

White died less than a minute’s ride from where Scooterville once stood. Hedstrom says it’s a corner where trucks must take wide turns — like the one that caused Tuesday’s fatal crash. Is the oil price equation as simple as this: More scooters are on the road, so more trucks will hit scooters, and more scooter riders will die?

Not necessarily, Hedstrom says. With more scooters on local roads, he speculates, drivers are “cognizant of a new thing. More might not be worse. More might be better.” Paradoxically Scooterville has done fewer post-crash repair estimates even as scooter sales have doubled over the last year.