One of my favorite things in Pittsburgh that I think more Pittsburghers should know about is the Dirty Dozen Bike Race.
The race is usually held the Saturday after Thanksgiving, but for 2019, the race has been moved up a month to October!
I’ve updated all of my old posts with new information over on Very Local, everything you need to know about the history of the race and being a spectator is all right here.
We’ve also published a video about Jeremiah Sullivan, he’s the guy who has successfully completed the Dirty Dozen race on a Healthy Ride Bike.
You can watch the video here, on YouTube or Facebook. (PS – we are always looking for more Pittsburgh stories to share over on Very Local. Have a story idea? Send me an email lindsay.patross@verylocal.com.)
With Thanksgiving just one week away, one of the questions that pops up around this time of year is “where can I volunteer to help serve a holiday meal?” In addition to volunteering, here are some Thanksgiving events around Pittsburgh that support great local causes. Know of other events that should be on the list? Please share in the comments below.
Pedal for the Pantry 2018 – Food drive bike ride/race
Sat. 11/17 – for those who like to bike in the cold
This one caught my eye on Facebook because of the image posted on the Facebook event. Pedal around Pittsburgh picking up items for a Thanksgiving dinner and drop those items off at the Wilkinsburg Food Pantry, earn points and win awesome prizes. Check out the Facebook page for some of the very nice prizes including swag from BikePgh and a bike that was donated by Golden Triangle Bike Rental.
44th Annual Thanksgiving Eve Community Meal – Volunteers & Donations Needed
Wed. 11/21: for anyone who can lend a hand or donate a few dollars
This one is near and dear to my heart. A friend who grew up helping with these dinners asked me to help out a few years ago. I showed up late, which ended up being helpful because they needed someone to take over on the dishwashing. (Life lesson – it is never too late to show up to volunteer). This meal started as an Eagle Scout project – offer up a free, home-cooked Thanksgiving meal. Last year over 100 volunteers showed up and helped to cook and serve dinner for 200 people. It is a beautiful thing when neighbors come together to share a meal. Every little bit helps if you want to volunteer for an hour that is great. If you can donate $10 that is helpful too. Last year 64 people made a donation to the GoFundMe page, I’m hoping we can beat that number this year.
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Volunteer – anytime after 10 am
Dinner 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Location: First United Methodist Church Social Hall, the entrance is on Centre Ave above the Toy Lending Library, across from Panera.
It’s probably not cool to nerd out about transportation, but boy howdy did we ever at the Western PA Mobility Showcase hosted by City of Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI). The Showcase, held in Oakland at Pitt’s Alumni Hall, featured everything from autonomous vehicles to bike-shares to other futuristic stuff like a hyperloop proposal as well as a super sweet electric car.
In a release announcing the event, the Director of DOMI, Karina Ricks, outlined the importance of the Showcase, saying “transportation is radically changing. New choices in travel and new technologies make it cleaner and more convenient than ever. New innovations make headlines every week – many of them originating from our own Southwestern Pennsylvania researchers and industries.” Director Ricks is right, transportation is rapidly evolving. Remember when you couldn’t use an app to just magically ping a nearby car to come pick you up? That was only a few years ago. Remember when you needed someone to actually drive the vehicle you were in? Yeah, that’s a thing of the past! Transportation now is higher-tech and in some ways beyond what we could have ever imagined, or at least that’s what we found at the Mobility Showcase.
Transportation Nerds wander around event
So what did we see?
Autonomous Transportation
Uber was at the event. If you don’t know Uber by now, then you don’t own a smartphone, probably don’t live in Pittsburgh, or are from the past.
Also, showing off driver-less vehicles were Easymile, Navya, and Local Motes. The three companies all have box-shaped futurist transports similar to the ones found in the film Total Recall. Unrelated to anything in particular, both Easymile and Navya have promo videos with Muzak sounding techno music, and Local Motors went with the classic hard rock. Listen and watch their videos below.
Easymile…
And Nayva…
Local Motors’ Ollie…
Pittsburgh’s Bikeshare
Walking is fine, we guess, but biking is way faster. The event presented a few two-wheeled options for getting around the Steel City.
Healthy Ride rep explains the share in Bike Share
Healthy Ride allows you to grab a bike from one of its many docking stations you have probably already seen around the City. Apparently, you can totally use your ConnectCard for free unlimited 15 minute rides. That’ll almost get you from East Liberty to the Strip District.
Bucking the whole bike docking station concept were two other bike-share companies, LimeBike and Spin, that took up opposing corners at the event. Both LimeBike and Spin allow you to get on, ride, and just leave their bikes wherever. It’s similar to what you do with your clothes at the end of the day; you put em on, take em off, and throw them wherever when you get home. Both companies use GPS, self-locking, and apps, but have different looking bikes.
Software and more
Advanced software was used by pretty much everything at the Showcase, but some of the specialized technology on display at the event will change transportation operations and infrastructure going forward.
If you’ve ever sat endlessly at a red light when there is no cross traffic, you will probably be interested in tech from Rapid Flow. The tech company, which spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a software called Surtrac that uses artificial intelligence to sense traffic conditions. They apparently are already working with the City of Pittsburgh, so hopefully, this flippin’ traffic here in town will soon be a thing of the past.
The University of Pittsburgh showed off its new real-time transit screen, created by the appropriately named TransitScreen. It shows all transportation options in the area from buses to bike-share to Zipcar/Uber/Lyfts. It’s the thing we always needed, but for some reason we never had. You can see when your transport is going to actually arrive. Don’t believe us, go to Oakland and be amazed!
Carnegie Mellon University’s Traffic21 also had a table. Traffic21 is a multi-disciplinary research institute where us transportation nerds can, according to its website, “design, test, deploy and evaluate information and communications technology-based solutions to address the problems facing the transportation system of the Pittsburgh region and the nation.”
Are you an Uber or Lyft driver? Then you are going to want to download the free app Gridwise that is designed to help drivers optimize their time and increase earnings.
Roadbotics demo map
Until we have flying cars – thanks for lying to us Back to the Future 2 – we have to deal with roads. But, if you weren’t aware, roads need to be constantly repaired. Roadbotics will map and photo all those stupid potholes across a city or town. You can see how they marked a town outside Pittsburgh right now here. The rep at the event mentioned that it would be a yearly process beating out the current every three-year road review he says the city currently uses. (We were too excited from the event to fact check this.)
A Vehicle for you & your friends
Need a car to get out of the City? Why you’d want to leave the Burgh, we do not know, but Zipcar is still available if you need it.
Chariot uses a Ford Transit Wagon like a bus. It’s mass transit for company employees or it can charter you to some far-off destination, maybe a group wine trip you and your friends have been putting off.
Tesla parked outside Pitt’s Alumni Hall
Tesla parked one of their sexy vehicles outside of Alumni Hall. We want this, erh, we need this. At Tesla’s table, we signed up for a chance to win driving a Tesla for a week. But if someone wants to buy it for us, or if Tesla wants to just give it to us, we wouldn’t object.
Also, pedaling all-electric vehicles were Proterra, which offers electric buses. Having a non-fossil fuel mass transit system would surely make us one of the most sustainable cities in the country (a green trait we’d love to rub in other city’s faces). Pittsburgh Port Authority actually purchased one of these ‘lectric Proterra buses, but other cities bought more than one :(. Oh, it also should be noted that Proterra is an American based company… U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.!
Hyperloop from Chicago to Columbus to Pittsburgh?
Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) had a table at the event. Why was an Ohio-based group at a Pittsburgh event? The MORPC are the ones who put together the hyperloop proposal that goes from Chicago to Columbus to Pittsburgh. A hyperloop is literally magic, using magnetic levitation to float a pod above a track which zips along at super-fast speeds. An image behind the MORPC table indicated that it would take 20+ minutes to get to Columbus with the hyperloop system. We need this now; there’s a freaking shuffleboard club opening in Chicago that we need to check out!
All and all the Western PA Mobility Showcase was pretty awesome. We learned a lot, saw some cool stuff, and daydreamed about taking a hyperloop to Chicago, using one of the bike-shares to ride to DC in the summer, taking driver-less vehicles to hang with friends, and washing our shiny new Tesla. The event really showed that a futuristic Pittsburgh isn’t something far away, it’s happening right now.
This video just popped up on the Pittsburgh subreddit and it is worth 5 minutes of your time. It is a beautiful little story about how the filmmaker, Dean Bogdanovic, purchased an old bike on Craigslist and fixed it up at Kraynick’s Bike Shop in Garfield. This video checks all of the boxes for me… pretty Pittsburgh pictures, check, a story about locally owned business, check, vintage bicycles, check (I have a hot pink one in my basement waiting for a restoration). This five-minute video is a delight to watch. Even if you aren’t a regular cyclist or bicycle collector, I think you will enjoy the scenery.
One little plea to the filmmaker and cyclists in Pittsburgh, please consider wearing a helmet when you are riding.
Nine years ago I wrote a post about how Mr. Kraynik fixes donated bikes for kids. Does anyone know if Mr. Kraynick or anyone else around town fixes up bikes for kids?
Last Friday evening, I went searching for Frank Lenz, one of Pittsburgh’s most notable cyclists. To be fair, Lenz went missing almost 120 years ago, in Erzurum, Turkey, so I really didn’t have much hope of finding anything, but I figured I’d give it a shot.
I headed over to the Brew House Art Gallery on the South Side, where David Herlihy, the author of The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance, was slated to give a talk about Lenz’s journey by bicycle around the world, his disappearance, and the adventures of William Sachtleben, another cyclist who had ridden around the world, and who was sent to find Lenz. Prior to Herlihy’s talk, I had not heard of Lenz or Sachtleben, but a worldwide cycling tour intrigued me, and plus, who doesn’t liked those old-timey, big-wheeled bikes?
Lenz and his companions, rocking the big-wheelers
Lenz was apparently a big fan. Born in Philadelphia, he moved to Pittsburgh and became an accountant by day, and a weekend warrior who captained the Allegheny Cycle Club. He organized and competed in his fair share of big-wheeled bike races, and pioneered the burgeoning field of cycle photography—an impressive feat, considering that cameras were just as cumbersome as bicycles at the time. Lenz developed a way to transport camera equipment on his back while riding, as well as a method of taking pictures of himself on his bicycle, by placing a trigger on the road, which would activate a camera on a leading car when his front tire (the big one) rolled over it.
Lenz used his growing portfolio to convince a magazine called Outing to fund his trip around the world. Outing agreed, on the condition that he give up the big-wheeler for the newer version, called a “safety bicycle,” which is similar to our modern one. Lenz reluctantly agreed, and, in May of 1892, he set off. Beginning at the Smithfield Street Bridge, Lenz rode for Washington, D.C. to pick up a passport, and then to New York City. He then crossed the U.S. in about five months, then sailed to Japan, and braved tough conditions in China and India before heading to Turkey. In May of 1894, almost two years after his departure, Lenz disappeared. Hoping to find him, Outing sent William Sachtleben, who had completed a similar journey, to Turkey. Sachtleben discovered that Lenz had apparently insulted a chief in nearby Kurdistan, who had ordered him murdered and his body buried by a riverbed. After some wrangling, the Turkish government paid Lenz’s mother $7,500 as a reparation for her lost son
Today, Lenz is commemorated with a sign on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail, the final leg of the Great Allegheny Passage, which connects Pittsburgh with Cumberland, Maryland, and which mirrors the path that Lenz took on the first leg of his now legendary trip around the world.
This sign can be found on the Three Rivers Heritage Trail
