Signals Crossed

Leap Day is a bizarre day. Seems appropriate to share something bizarre.

Whilst riding on my route a few weeks back, I was heading north on Front Street when I saw something strange at Girard Avenue:

If you'll notice the traffic lights, the red and green lights are illuminated at the same time. After pausing and realizing that the cross traffic had a red light, I proceeded through the intersection, but decided to wait on the sidewalk. This wasn't just a one-time glitch. It happened through each cycle:

All hazards aside, it was pretty neat and (I assumed) rare to see this sort of thing. Until last week, when it happened at a different intersection, Columbia & Girard:

Furthermore, this one also had a glitch on the yellow light:

For what it's worth and for all of the flack I give the motorists in this city, there were no crashes at either intersection. There were plenty of confused people, myself included... I guess with all the construction in the area, incidents like these are bound to happen?

New Kid on the Block

Today, the weather was finally pleasant enough for me to take my new bike out for a ride! Before that, I owe an old friend a memoriam:

Angel, I hardly knew ye.

My Mom found her on Craigslist 2 years ago, and it's hard to believe I only had her for that short of a time. Shortly after I moved to Philly, Angel became my primary method of commuting. We shared rides damn near every day and hundreds more memories along the way. I rode her in the Naked Bike Ride, and even shlepped her to the beach on multiple occasions. She almost took the place of my guitar as my most beloved travel companion. Almost.

Looking at that picture, you can't imagine there's much wrong with the old girl, still, I couldn't bear riding her again after the horrific accident we unfortunately shared last October. She was still in working order afterward, but something just didn't feel "right," so I had to say goodbye. Rust in pieces, onward and upward:

A horse with no name...

My Sister gave me her bike (laugh it up) after I parted with Angel as an interim solution to my cycling needs, and though she has performed admirably, I knew I would eventually need a bike that was more, y'know, me. So you can imagine my pleasant delight when my Mom graciously surprised me with this Trek 7.0 FX on my birthday!

That was 2 months ago. Being that it was Winter and largely crap-tastic outside, I didn't want to get my shiny new bike dirty, so she's sat inside lo these many weeks until today. I originally had other plans, but nice days have been so few and far between lately. I didn't have any set plan when I left the house either. The ride kind of became what it wanted. I rode up to my old neighborhood (not much has changed), stopped by City Hall to visit Philly Jesus:

And he followed me on Instagram. Who's the shepherd now?

I decided to head up towards Fairmount/Brewerytown and found this very out of place yet awesome bamboo patch on North 22nd Street:

I've been told it grows better when supplemented with human urine. Think about that.

And finally, after about an hour of cruising around, I decided I was thirsty and stopped by Crime and Punishment Brewery, which I'd been meaning to visit for several months as well:

Mushroom dumplings. Hold the psiloscybin.

Belgian, Brown, Sour. Full taste spectrum.

Because "Drunktown" just didn't have a nice ring to it...

Overall, the beer was decent, and I'll go back, but I'm not necessarily raving about it. In any case, I'm glad I finally crossed this place off my non-existent bucket list. I came outside about an hour later and noticed this pretty neat old building:

I'll admit that I didn't know what a cornice was...or that it appears here on the cornice...

It's a damn shame they don't build neat buildings any more. Fortunately people are doing other neat things these days, one of which I spotted on my ride home:

Not the bike. The mural. Duh.

This bridge on 33rd street between Girard Avenue and Oxford Street is a large art installation by Joe Boruchow that I'd heard about last Autumn and again, never got around to seeing, even though it's a short 10-minute ride from our Wash Cycle laundromat. It was well worth the ride today. There's so much to love about it! I've long been a fan of M.C. Escher, and I see a lot of his elements in this:

It took me 5 minutes to get enough of a lapse in traffic to take this panorama.

Plus, it's a big piece of art! I'll spare you the social commentary and any in-depth review. I took more pictures, but you should go see it for yourself if you have the chance.

As you can see, it was starting to get dark, so I decided to head home. After about 2 hours on the bike (and one in the brewery), that seemed like enough. Not a bad way to break in a bike, eh? Looking forward to many more fond memories, and deciding on a name...

Have a good week, y'all!

Go Philly, Go!

Excuse me while I toot my own horn for just a second, but I've noticed that one thing that comes naturally  to me is being a "brand ambassador" of causes I truly believe in - be it macrobiotics, bicycling, whatever. I took some time off from social functions for a while, mostly for personal reasons, but in the last week or so, I decided to jump back into the fold, because dammit, I actually missed it! On Thursday night, I went to an event sponsored by my friends at Spoke Magazine, Indego, and a new multi-modal transportation website, GoPhillyGo.org:

THE COLORS!

In case you wanted to see a magazine cover from a moderately artistic perspective...

I went to the event on behalf of myself while also representing my own interests as a Wash Cyclist. I went, primarily, to hang out with some cycling friends and see what this new site was all about (more on that in a minute). Plus, the free food and beer (duh):

There are seitan wings in the foreground. Vegetarian win!

The turnout was pretty amazing, as you can see below:

Apologies to the bar stool that felt the brunt of my feet, but I guess that's better than a butt?

I wanna say it was about 50-strong in the upstairs room at Fergie's Pub. Pretty righteous. All representing different interests, but all united by one thing: bicycling. I've never considered myself a salesman, but I spent most of the 2ish hours there telling everyone what I do, passing out business cards LIKE AN ADULT and learning more about what they did in the Philly sustainability community.

I noticed again, what I've noticed before, that as much as we try to put ourselves out there, this city is still so huge and there are many people who have no idea what I do. In turn, I found out about a lot of other great initiatives going on that I'm gonna try to get involved with (and perhaps blog about) in the future. I got a great feeling after the event was over, and I'm genuinely feeling like I'm starting to make a name for myself and my personal/professional interests. We'll see...

So back to the point of the event, Go Philly Go. It's a new site designed to make multimodal transportation easier for the Philly area. Pretty awesome idea, right? I've been doing this myself basically since I moved here because, well, driving in the city SUCKS. And until now, I (like everyone else) would just piece it together at the mercy of GoogleMaps or my own intuition. It works with mixed results. I basically have the routes nailed down to the places I frequent (grocery stores, restaurants, etc), but in the future, if I have to venture outside my comfort zone, this is gonna be very useful.

In a nutshell, multimodal transportation is a reminder to me that, even though we encounter backlash as cyclists, there is a large support community and it's not supported just by those who ride bikes. SEPTA, for all its criticism, is pretty great most of the time, and the fact that there is enough cycling awareness to get this kind of event together is a reminder that we're all in this together, and we're making great progress. Go Philly.