Their age was likely the reason Chris is autistic. There's a strangling between stale eggs and autists, especially backed up by the extreme increase in autistic births coinciding with the average age of mothers rising closer to 40 in the late 1990s.
The age of the father matters too. To a lesser degree than the mother, but it does have an effect. Male reproductive organs have a longer functional lifespan, so the quality of the gametes doesn't decay at the same rate as the final run of eggs.
One of those 49cc vespa knock-offs would work. I'm interested to see what pony tattoo Chris would put on its ass. Also some electric scooters can be pretty beefy these days, though I think Virginia limits them to 1kW and 30mph without a motorcycle endorsement on your license.
Mopeds are just motorized bikes (the "ped" comes from "pedals"). They were just the e-bikes before e-bikes. The low power non-motorcycle-licensed ones you can only use on local roads. While early e-bikes looked more like conventional bicycles, there are models of more robust design such that they now more resemble a modern moped (which went through the exact same evolution).
Regarding stroads, it's not so much a stroad issue, but a highway issue, given that the only major routes through Ruckersville are acutal highways. But since he's not going to be living at 14BC, and probably not in Ruckersville, the rural highway issue may not apply.
Many stroads do have bicycle infrastructure, albeit usually just a bike lane. It is not bike-friendly but at least you don't have to ride directly in a traffic lane. The biggest problem with stroads is that they are unfriendly to walking and walking-conducive environments, which has the knock-on effect of making bicycle journeys longer.
Urban stroads often have parallel smaller arterials a superblock away with more reasonable speed limits that are better for biking.
