“There’s just something about three bucks that makes it that magic number,” Soule said. “We’ll notice a bit of a lull and one of us will go out and pass the gas station, call the other and say, ‘What do you know? Gas prices are under three bucks.’”

AAA Michigan reported Oct. 1 that while statewide gas prices declined 3.9 cents from the week before, drivers in the Lansing/East Lansing metro area paying 3.3 cents more, or $2.88 per gallon.

Jim Rink, a spokesman for AAA Michigan, said an increase in gas prices within a small area of the state while the rest of the state sees a decrease is rare.

“That’s not usually the case,” he said. “Usually when prices go down, they go down consistently throughout the state.”

In October 2004 the average price was $1.95.

Higher demand causes price to increase, Rink said. By selling more scooters, Soule and Shellhorn hope to drive that demand down.

“It makes a lot more sense to fill up your scooter with a gallon and a half of gas and get 200 miles a tank,” Soule said. “If we have more people driving scooters and other alternative forms of transportation, we might help drive down the price at the pump and offset those of us driving the Hummer around town.”

Soule worked for MSU as part of its eight-year Campaign for MSU fundraising program. While working on campus, he noticed students driving scooters could use campus roads and still park at bike racks.

Eventually, Soule sought out a scooter for himself. When the lowest price he could find, locally, was $1,800, Soule made the leap into the scooter business with his long-time friend, Shellhorn. The scooters at their shop sell for $899-$999.

“I said to Shellhorn that what East Lansing needs is an alternative transportation caviar,” Soule said. “We thought about how perfect that would be given that what we have is one of the largest campuses in the Big Ten where students are forced to park miles away from their class.”

As the business has begun doing service work for customers, the owners are seeing they made the right choice in sifting through suppliers of lower quality scooters.

“There’s a lot of junk out there, and unfortunately we’re seeing that now,” Soule said. “We see a lot of that same junk come in with the scooters that students that didn’t buy from us and have had problems.”

If scooter sales are determined by gas prices, Rink said the store may be in luck.

Regular grade gasoline prices are projected to average $2.75 per gallon nationally in 2007 and $2.83 per gallon in 2008.