Afshin Kaighobady outside his new Mount Airy electric-assist bicycle shop on Oct. 8, 2009. Photo: Pam Rogow for Technically Philly

It was a yellow bicycle. That much Afshin Kaighobady remembers clearly.

On cool mornings in 1969, the 10-year-old would ride to the bakery near his home in Tehran to buy his mother fresh bread. Riding on the flat roads of Iran’s sprawling capital city at the foot of the Tochal mountains, Kaighobady can still remember his pride for riding his bike with just one hand, the other clutching a warm piece of naan fresh out of the bakery’s diesel-powered flames.

“The steam would pour off it, and so one bite and then another and soon I’d half finish the bread that was nearly as tall as I was, all the while steering this long, yellow treasure,” he says.

It is there, in Tehran in 1969, that Kaighobady first fell in love with bicycles. It is here, in the far hillier expanses of Mt. Airy in 2009, that Kaighobady, now 50, is hoping to create love for that transport’s next generation.

This Thursday, from 2 to 7 p.m., he’s hosting an opening reception for Philly Electric Wheels, his shop in this northwest Philadelphia neighborhood that he boasts is the first store in Pennsylvania, perhaps even the tri-state area, to exclusively sell and service electric-assist bicycles.

And he’s trying to convince the region that these bikes could be a large part of a greener, more comfortable, more practical way to commute.

THE BICYCLES

Philly Electric Wheels or, yes, PHEW, if pressed, came to mind after Kaighobady watched his wife Meenal Raval use an electric bike to commute to work and found a buzz around her method of transport. Since opening his store Oct. 1, he’s spending his days offering free test rides — also available at this Thursday’s reception — to show people just how practical his bikes are.

“They have everything that is good about regular bicycles,” he says. “But with the option to have someone gently push you in the back when you’re going up a hill or speeding in bad weather.”

He currently stocks 16 models from four bicycle lines — Currie Technologies, EcoBike, eZee, Ultra Motor — all of which cost roughly a penny a mile to operate, range up to 40 miles per charge, can cruise as fast as 20 miles per hour and require no license.

The cheapest model he currently stocks is $500 — the starting cost of a new traditional bicycle at many bike shops — and the most expensive is $2,700. A removable battery powers the bikes and are plugged into the wall, to be charged as easily as a cell phone battery, though it’ll take five to six hours for most bikes.

All bicycles come with warranties, many including a one-year maintenance guarantee from Kaighobady himself.

And Kaighobady, with an engineering degree from the University of Bridgeport and a background in tinkering, is probably someone from whom you want a warranty.

HIS BACKGROUND

After leaving Iran in 1979 — unrelated to that country’s Islamist Revolution, he says, though that year “something big happened there” — Kaighobady followed family to Oklahoma City. He built a computer consultancy firm on the East Coast, and then moved to Mount Airy in 2000 with wife Meenal, a native of India.

“This neighborhood has been very good to us,” he says.

He’s been involved in a half-dozen eco-ventures, though PHEW is his first swing at retail. Since 2006, the couple has tried to create a low-carbon household, which fits well into living down the block from his store. Also, the store is located in Green on Greene, a mixed-use building with a mission of sustainability. An environmentally friendly household-products manufacturer is also based there.

Kaighobady has used his mechanical mind for greener transport before.

In July 2007, he finished making a homemade electric-powered Volkswagen Vanagon, and says two men who claimed to be Chevron employees in March 2006 paid $3,900 for a 1979 Jetta he rigged to run on a biodiesel from used fryer oil.

“But these bikes,” Kaighobady says, in his stark corner storefront, a half dozen store models carefully arrayed on the hardwood floor, “are really going to be part of the future.”

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

PECO announced yesterday that 50 “smart” switches, which help prevent wide outages and improve service, are being installed on its grid in Delaware, Chester, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties this year, according to a press release.

At $50,000 to $60,000 per device, PECO has invested $4 million into the project. Installation will begin as soon as this month in Media, North Wales and the Roxborough section of northwest Philadelphia.

These new “smart” switches break up a circuit and automatically isolate issues that could cause outages. They’re even wired to communicate problems back to operation headquarters. If a circuit fails, a customer is automatically re-routed to an adjacent circuit and PECO is notified on which circuit the problem has occurred.

“These are one part of a smart system that utilizes these switches to minimize the effects of outages on customers,” spokesman Ben Armstrong tells Technically Philly.

The smart switches are known in the industry as reclosers and sectionalizers, which essentially do the same thing but on different lines of voltage.

Thirteen-hundred distribution circuits in the Greater Philadelphia area have already been augmented with the smart technology and PECO says that the switches have prevented outages for more than a half-million customers.

Armstrong didn’t immediately know how many total distribution circuits are on the system to compare with the number of smart switches.

The switch upgrades are part of a $400 million capital investment program which will upgrade facilities, improve delivery and increase energy efficiency. Sections of Northeast Philadelphia and central Bucks County have already been upgraded with the smart system.

Ari Weinstein, 15, in the computer lab of Germantown Friends School, where he just finished 9th grade. Yukari Kane/The Wall Street Journal

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Ari Weinstein is the youngest Mount Airy-based hacker we’ve featured on Technically Philly in our long and illustrious history.

Weinstein, 15, is apparently “getting job offers from Israel and all over the place,” and will follow in my footsteps and appear on Fox 29 Monday morning (See clip here), after his place in a Wall Street Journal cover story that ran this week, as reported dutifully by our boy Joe DiStefano.

Weinstein is a contributor to iJailBreak.com, a blog devoted to help users install unapproved software onto Apple’ iPhone and iPod touch products.

Dude is keeping it straight tech raw in northwest Philly, even while he’s in summer camp on the Left Coast. Dude’s father Ken is a developing playing a large role in something of a retail resurgence in Mount Airy, DiStefano reports, including his ownership of the Trolley Car Diner.

H/T Joey D

After the jump, more Ben Franklin Technology Partners dispute, a Digital Philadelphia op-ed and six other tech stories you should read, including our best read article of the week.

Ordered by an incredibly complex algorithm rendering importance:

• eSchool News reports on complications to the doom and gloom three-year appraisal of Microsoft’s West Philadelphia School of the Future, near the Zoo.
• Plan Philly reports that another announced delay for SEPTA‘s smart card movement could actually be, uh, smart.
• Philly Tech News gives insight and detail to the conversation about state fundign for early stage funder Ben Franklin Technology Partners, after Joey D took apart BFTP.
• The Official Google Blog announces the launch of a new feature to its image search that scans for creative commons content, something awfully users for Web content creators. Will this hurt big stock photo business and drive down freelance photographers? We aren’t supportive of the Google blog making a totally lame and predictable reference to the 67th ward as the example in their post though. In other Google news, the New York Times BITS blog reports that the Beta tag on Google applications was finally dropped.
• The Philadelphia Daily News features an op-ed from stakeholders in Philadelphia’s digital divide dialogue. The op-ed was cross-posted on Young Philly Politics, which also featured a video from the Digital Philadelphia Initiative Summit, facilitated by the city’s CIO Allan Frank. See that video below.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Shop Talk: School District of Philadelphia launches probe into its computer recycling program

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

Officers on South Street, in University City, Center City and Southwest Philadelphia also begin using the new toys this week.

Try not to cringe at how ridiculous the two-wheeled, self-balancing, battery-powered vehicles may seem, because its role in law enforcement has been growing for years and doesn’t appear it will stop. More than 1,000 municipalities are using them for patrolling, according to the company.

Now, after a 10-day trial in April 2008, the Philadelphia Police Department is joining in.

The department announced yesterday that it received a donation of more than $60,000 toward the purchase of ten Segway PTs, according to a press release [PDF]. The funds came from the Philadelphia Police Foundation, a nonprofit that raises funds to purchase technology and other police equipment that are deemed outside the city’s budget. Yes, our police department takes charity.

“Segways are an extension of foot patrol, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said in the release. They are another valuable tool for our officers in helping to make Philly safer, particularly in commercial corridors. Segways are highly visible, cover a lot of ground quickly, and put our officers out there interacting with the community every day.

Read the company’s pitch to police departments.

What Gob from Arrested Development didn’t tell you is that police rave about Segway patrols, which put cops on the street to interact like they do on walking beats but also give them an edge in a chase and can increase their coverage area, as the Inquirer reported.

Read about their patrol-specific limitations here. The company boasts their green aptitude, too.

“Everyone has a vested interest in making Philadelphia the safest city possible,” Robert Ciaruffoli, current president of the Philadelphia Police Foundation, said in the release. “Our priority is to mobilize the business and professional communities to join with the PPD in bringing this goal to fruition.”

If you want your own Segway adventure, don’t rob a cop, just take a tour on one around the Art Museum.