SGV Connect 119: GoSGV and Carribean Fragoza's Scary Bike Crash

SGV Connect

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.”