When I was six years old, there were only two kinds of people in the world: those who knew how to ride a bicycle and those who did not.
I took the training wheels off my bike when I was seven, and it was only a few minutes until my bike and I fell onto the hot, unforgiving blacktop pavement of my elementary school parking lot -- remembered by a scar that can still be found on my knee.
I got my first real mountain bike in eighth grade when my parents convinced themselves that I had completed my final adolescent growth spurt. After our last day of school, my friends and I took our new bikes out for a ride around the town. Of course, disaster struck -- one of my friends swerved to avoid hitting a parked car, only to collide into me. I walked away from the crash with a bent helmet, a couple of superficial leg gashes, and the large groin bruise that followed when the handlebars made unfortunate contact.
Needless to say, I couldn't walk for two weeks and passed the time by reading Brave New
World and Robinson Crusoe, books which my mother assured me had no bicycles in them whatsoever.
But you can imagine my excitement when I bought a new mountain bike last week. Previously, I had relied on my own two feet and the occasional cab to get me around campus. Everyday I would watch lazier, punctual students speed past me down Locust Walk to class while I was well aware that I would walk into class ten minutes late. I could do little but curse at my roommate for his extra long shower and seethe inside. I vowed that one day I would wake up at 9:55 a.m. for a 10 a.m. class in the Towne Building and still arrive early. With my new bike, that day has surely come.
To ensure my bike's safety, I spoke with Penn Police Sgt. Washington, the officer who handles the bicycle division of campus safety. He mentioned that the biggest safety concern for his division was the large number of student cyclists who do not wear helmets, a safety precaution which can prevent serious injuries to the head and neck. He added that it is critical to buy a U-lock and lock the front of the wheel and frame to a bike rack, preferably a rack located in a heavily trafficked, highly visible area.
According to campus safety, the three most common places on campus for bike theft occurrences include the west side of Steinberg-Dietrich on 37th Street, Stemmler Hall in the Medical School complex behind the Quadrangle, and the racks between Civic House and High Rise North. Washington advised me and other students to bring and lock our bikes inside apartments, fraternity houses, or dorm rooms.
Washington said that more than half of the bicycles he encounters are secured poorly, and few of those bicycles are registered with the police. Regardless of the quality, criminals will nearly always take a bicycle that has not been secured properly.
After my lesson in bike safety, I mingled with my bicycle brethren at the First Union Cycling Championship last Sunday. Nearly 750,000 Delaware Valley bicycle enthusiasts watched some of the world's best road racers tackle the longest single day bicycle road race in America. The 156 mile bicycle course loops around the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Kelly Drive, and the 17 percent-grade incline at Manayunk Wall ten times, lasting about six hours.
I arrived at the Parkway halfway through the race and encountered thousands of middle-aged men with skin-tight bicycle shorts and fitted jerseys, accompanied by their embarrassed families. After looking at future versions of myself for nearly half an hour, I decided to escape to Manayunk where I thought there would surely be young people cavorting around and falling off this so-called "wall."
Sure enough, thousands of twenty-somethings were eating and drinking outside their apartments along the hills of the neighborhood. The mass public intoxication of the event resembled Hey Day with a bike race running through it. I arrived too late to witness the streaking and five-story keg stands, but was fortunate enough to catch the beer-bottle race from the top of the wall to Main street -- quite a sight. Heineken was leading
Yuengling and Guinness before the police confiscated the bottles.
That afternoon I rode back to campus injury-free. I decided to test my new mode of transportation, timing my ride through campus. The 12 minute walk from Bennett Hall to High Rise South took me only two minutes twenty-eight seconds.
Yes, with my new bicycle my days as a pedestrian are coming quickly to an end -- that is, as long as I don't collide into anything along the way.
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