Los Angeles Times on cicLAvia
Several people have sent me this article from Thursday’s L.A. Times on the efforts there to start a ciclovia.
Imagine L.A. without cars. A town where people ride their bikes and walk in the streets, and the smell of tacos and veggie burgers drifts through the air instead of exhaust.
Sound like a pipe dream? Not if a group called cicLAvia is successful. The volunteer coalition of bicycle advocates, transportation experts, artists and academics wants to make Sundays in L.A. virtually car-free — transforming the city’s streets into giant bike lanes.
“This city is so park-poor and so car-dependent,” says Jonathan Parfrey, cicLAvia member and director of the Green LA Institute. “Air pollution is awful, and childhood obesity is epidemic. But building new parks for people to get out of their cars and exercise can be prohibitively expensive. We want to create public space using the infrastructure we already have — our roads.”
The idea, called a “ciclovia,” isn’t new. A phenomenon across Latin America, the ciclovia was born in the Colombian city of Bogotá 30 years ago. The city is car-choked and polluted, but every Sunday, Bogotá’s major avenues are shut down to cars, and hundreds of thousands of cyclists take to the streets. CicLAvia wants to replicate that success.
–EBR
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:47 pm
I visited LA last year on my bike tour and was pleasantly surprised to find a thriving and very vibrant bike community in the midst of such a decentralized, car dependent city. Plus, now they have the support of Jared Leto, so you know bike culture there is definitely going mainstream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VhZDiG7ye0