Branson, MO is turning to scooters to help blue collar workers and their transportation needs. Maybe we should do that in PDX? It seems in Portland we only hear the voices of college educated far left progressives and their desire to redesign Portland to fit their intolerant and non-inclusive ideology. Should we help the workers here?
Mr. Stallings first heard about a scooter program for the poor in Memphis, where a nonprofit called MyCityRides has put more than 450 working people on wheels. His fledgling project in Branson, an extension of the Memphis project, had fewer than 20 participants as of early June.
But he envisions scooters everywhere — a taste of Ho Chi Minh City in the Ozarks. Soon, he said, hundreds of temporary foreign workers will arrive, under the State Department’s J-1 visa program, filling jobs to meet the summer tourist crush. Mr. Stallings plans to offer them smaller scooters to rent for $50 per week.
Early-adopting locals are already seeing benefits. A scooter owner named Ryan Booth, 31, lives 15 miles from his job at a place called Crazy Craig’s Cheeky Monkey Bar. “I’ve got an old car that’s about to blow up on me at any point,” he said.
The workers are co-signers on their scooter loans along with Elevate Branson, making payments of about $160 per month toward eventually owning the vehicles outright. The nonprofit pays for scooter training, insurance, maintenance, repairs, a helmet and motorcycle jacket. At about $5 per day, Mr. Stallings said, it is a relative bargain, particularly compared with a round-trip Uber ride.
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