Towed by the PPA, frustrated with SEPTA, he took an electric scooter onto Lincoln Drive
The incident went viral, but Saladine Sharad says he was just trying to get to work.
Saladine Sharad was in a jam. The 34-year-old handyman from North Philly needed to get to a job in Roxborough, but he didn’t have a car. He says the PPA had towed it the night before. “I was on top of the snow,” Sharad said. “There weren’t any lines of demarcation.”
And speaking of the winter storm, it was still wreaking havoc on SEPTA. “It was detour after detour after detour,” Sharad said about the bus routes that day. It had been two weeks since it snowed, but cold weather had kept the city encased in snow and ice, and a brutal wind chill had plunged temperatures to historic lows. Sharad said bus operators were unavailable as a result. “Employees were calling off because of the weather or some craziness like that.”
It was two weeks after the storms He would have to take three buses to get to his job and three more to get home. That would cost almost $18. He only had $40 to get through the rest of the week, and several more jobs lined up. Plus, “with the way the weather was,” he said, “I’d be sitting outside for hours.”
So Sharad came up with a different plan. He found a shop that would finance an electric scooter for $40 down and set off toward Roxborough, following the “via bike” route on Google Maps. Having moved to Philadelphia from the Bronx in 2022, Sharad still wasn’t all that familiar with the city. He knew his part of town, near Broad and Logan, but Germantown was a mystery. Still, he zipped along its side streets on his newly purchased Yaddea Elite Prime without much concern for his safety.
It wasn’t until Google Maps ushered him out of the neighborhood and pointed him toward a busy intersection in a dense, wooded area that his anxiety spiked. He could see he was meant to reach a bike path dotting the four-lane road he was about to turn onto, but it was closed because of the snow. He had no choice but to take the “via car” route. As he turned, the road narrowed. Vehicles flew past him. Unbeknownst to Sharad, he was now on one of Philadelphia’s most dangerous streets: Lincoln Drive.
Car accidents occur almost every day on Lincoln Drive, a treacherous, shoulderless state road that winds along the perimeter of Wissahickon Valley Park. Drivers regularly take its hairpin curves at nearly twice the posted speed limit of 25 mph. Since 2019, five people have died driving on it. Fed-up residents who live nearby have long pushed for additional safety measures. In September 2023, the city’s Streets Department added speed tables along one of the most dangerous stretches to force drivers to slow down.
But that mid-February afternoon, they still appeared to be speeding to Sharad. “It looked like a NASCAR rally,” he said. Sharad had never driven on Lincoln Drive, but he immediately sensed he was in a precarious situation. He maneuvered as far to the right as he could and focused on the snaking road ahead. He tried to ignore how cold he was. “My hands were numb,” he said. “My legs were dead. If I moved them, it felt like a bunch of needles were poking me.”
He wasn’t wearing a helmet. He was scared, he said, but he had a job to get to. “It was one of those scares that, because you have the responsibility, it’s almost okay,” Sharad said. “Like, ‘I heard that there are alligators in this lake, but I’ve got to get to the other side.’”
What Sharad saw as commitment, though, others saw as recklessness. He remembers one driver shouting at him “out of concern.” Sharad let them know he was okay with a nod, and they drove off. But unbeknownst to Sharad, the driver had filmed him and uploaded the video to Instagram. “WHO MANS IS THIS??? Only in Philly electric scooter seen driving on Lincoln Drive,” the caption read.
The clip was already pinballing across local feeds when Sharad finally escaped Lincoln Drive via Henry Avenue and arrived at work. A few hours later, he finished building furniture for his customer, and they paid for an Uber so he would not have to ride the scooter home in the freezing cold. By then, the video had spread across Philly.
Still, it would take a few days to reach Sharad. He only saw it when a friend reached out to show it to him, wanting to know what happened to his car. Sharad was stunned. But the commenters seemed to understand his circumstances. “That’s probably his only transportation to work,” read a typical comment. “He not tryna get fired cuz SEPTA on bulls—,” read another.
Sharad seized the moment and reposted the clip. In follow-up videos, he criticized the PPA and SEPTA and hawked T-shirts he made to commemorate his ride.
He’s only made $50 so far, but it’s not his only income stream. In addition to his handyman work, he recently picked up a part-time job as a cashier at the Dollar Store. He hopes to be back behind the wheel soon. For now, he is still riding the scooter to work. “It’s all working itself out,” Sharad said. “Slowly, but surely.”