This week’s SGV Connect Podcast looks backward at the first year of the GoSGV Bike Share program and looks forward to Halloween and ArroyoFest.
First, we speak with Jose Jimenez, the education director for Active SGV about the GoSGV’s first year, celebrated earlier this month. There are over 100 bikes being rented monthly at the moment and over 400 people took part in the program in its first year. There will be a demonstration zone for the rental e-bikes at ArroyoFest this Sunday near the South Pasadena HUB.
You can get more information about GoSGV at their website, Arroyofest at the 626 Golden Streets Website, or read a transcript of our interview. Of course, if you’d like to enjoy more previews for ArroyoFest you can listen to our previous podcast about the history of this event or this piece by Joe Linton.
A quick note, in the interview we discuss the possibility of renting an e-bike from GoSGV just for the event this Sunday. But between when we conducted the interview and today, they have sold out of bikes for the event.
Our second interview is a horror story of the two-wheeled variety. Local writer Carribean Fragoza read us a nonfiction piece about riding alone and underprepared on the industrial Rush Street. Fragoza is an up and coming author who’s made the LA Times Best of lists with her gothic chicana prose and poetry.
The non-fiction piece she read for us today is named for and based on a lonely industrial corridor in South El Monte called Rush Street.
You can read the excerpt she reads for us at Tropics of Meta, or order the book she co-edited where it was first published, East of East the Making of Greater El Monte.
SGV Connect is supported by Foothill Transit, offering car-free travel throughout the San Gabriel Valley with connections to the new Gold Line Stations across the Foothills and Commuter Express lines traveling into the heart of downtown L.A. To plan your trip, visit Foothill Transit. “Foothill Transit. Going Good Places.”
This week's SGV Connect breaks our regular mold as Streetsblog L.A. editor Joe Linton conducts both interviews on the past and future of ArroyoFest which returns at the end of this month, on Sunday October 29th when a portion of the I-110 will be closed to cars and open to other uses in the morning.
First, Linton interviews Robert Gottlieb and Marcus Renner some of the leaders that brought Southern California the first ArroyoFest in 2003. Seven years before the first CicLAvia, ArroyoFest changed the conversation around transportation in the region. While we haven't seen the seismic change away from cars in the past two decades that some might have hoped for, the steps towards regional bike networks and an expanded transit system might not have been possible without ArroyoFest.
Linton then moves into an interview with Wes Reutimann with ActiveSGV who has been leading efforts for the 10/29 ArroyoFest. Reutimann goes over the schedule for the day that begins with a 10k run at 6:00 a.m. After Arroyofest ends at 11, there are local parties and cultural events planned for just off the route.
For more information on ArroyoFest 2023, visit their website.
SGV Connect is supported by Foothill Transit, offering car-free travel throughout the San Gabriel Valley with connections to the new Gold Line Stations across the Foothills and Commuter Express lines traveling into the heart of downtown L.A. To plan your trip, visit Foothill Transit. “Foothill Transit. Going Good Places.”