Scooter Legality: Is It Even Worth It?

In looking back over my goals for this year and next, most were accomplished, but the overall bugaboo of trying to legally ride and register a motorcycle or scooter in Shanghai remains exactly that: a huge bugaboo.

I'm beginning to rethink whether it's even worth the attempt to 'get legal'. Of course, I'm still going to ride scooters and motorbikes in Shanghai, there's no question about that, but the whole rigmoral of getting licenses, registration, etc. may be a needless waste of time and money.

Now that I have a motorcycle license from Canada, it may be easier to abandon the plan to register a bike, and just go for a Chinese motorcycle drivers license itself. It would mean upgrading the current Chinese car license I've got. Will start looking into that next year.

That way, with a license and no registration, it would be "more legal" or "semi legal" as opposed to no license and no registration. I've even used my car drivers license to get out of difficulties when stopped by police, which happens maybe once a year.

And this is the thing, the chances of getting stopped by police are extremely low to begin with, so why even bother with legit plates? Fake plates are good enough, which I've got.

On the other hand, the city has long wanted to get rid of any and all motorcycles within the downtown core, regardless of whether they have legal plates or not. The plates and licensing for bikes really means squat compared to the bigger picture of the Chinese obsession with private cars and the government drive to back it up. Since cars are higher up the food chain, then it's a simple matter of making them a higher priority and sidelining the motorcycles and scooters. To that end, I have seen a lot more streets with bike bans in the past few years, and of course the recent introduction of gas stations that refuse to fill up bikes downtown.

Basically I always get my gas in the suburbs and continue to use a system of jerry cans developed last April.

To put it simply, the city doesn't want bikes. I would imagine an outright ban in the years to come, like Guangzhou has done, but it's hard to predict when and if this would happen. The telling point will be the beginning of 2012 when city governments always want to enforce any new traffic rules.

Will see what happens, if anything does. Meanwhile I'm not exactly rushing to get legal plates.