I like Vespas, they're very stylish, but damn they are noisy, and not a nice rumble either but more like a very loud chainsaw. They give off a terrible amount of smoke compared more modern scooters too. I do often wonder why so few other new small motorcycles or scooters have similarly beautiful designs though. However, for me, having lived in a country with a motorbike culture for the last decade, the coolest thing…
Switched from Vespa (combustion) to Unu (electric) and Black Tea (electric) .. and the one feature I yearn for, from the Vespa era, is its noise factor. Electric is damn quiet, damn smooth, and damn fast. (And damn comfy.) And that can be a problem. Especially in a city like, say, Vienna, where people just do not check before they cross some of these little cosy streets. I became a much more alert and guarding rider…
And not just that: Street's full of smombies, already keeping in mind that the situation awareness of the average pedestrian is a joke to begin with.
Also... mopeds and scooters are not a problem here in big-city Europe, they blend virtually completely into the vehicle hum, with two notable outliers: a) asshole mods, and b) the odd classic, two-stroke sewing machine. But even then, there's many other vehicles much louder than scooters. In the countryside they might be more of burden, for obvious reasons.