Culture

CityLab Daily: Don’t Say Scooters Destroy ‘Historic Character’

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Old town road: Last week, a local vigilante began slapping “Save Historic Alexandria” stickers on scooters in Old Town Alexandria, the colonial-era heart of the Northern Virginia city. And while we’ve seen no shortage of reasons to criticize scooters, saying they threaten an area’s historic character puts a new spin on a classic complaint. Believe it or not, motorized scooters go all they way back to the 1910s, predating the establishment of Alexandria as a national historic district in 1946. (Aviator Amelia Earhart was a scooter fan back in the day.)