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.