Posted Apr 9, 2012, 5:00 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
Posts: 52,200
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CicLAvia Rules! How Bicyclists Made L.A. a Better Place
Apr 5 2012
By Hillel Aron
Page 1 of 4: http://www.laweekly.com/2012-04-05/n...cles-founding/
Quote:
They said it would never work here. This wasn't San Francisco, this wasn't New York, and this was most certainly not Portland. This was Los Angeles, where the car is king. To close seven miles of streets — and for what? To the city bureaucracy, it sounded like madness. "Where does it start?" asked a Department of Transportation representative. "Um ... ," replied Joe Linton, a bicycle activist. "And where does it end?" "It's ... don't think of it that way ... "
It was impossible to describe to someone who hadn't seen it. Not even Linton himself knew what to expect. He would later awake at 4 a.m. on the morning of the first CicLAvia on 10-10-10, panic stricken with the fear that no one would show up, that the streets would be empty and that he would be a laughingstock. But people did come — tens of thousands of them bicycling or walking (the Los Angeles Times made a probably overly optimistic guess of 100,000). They brought their serious bikes and their crazy bikes, their pets, their children. They were young and old, black, white, Asian and Hispanic. The streets — Sixth, Seventh and Spring — were filled with the soft, ambient sounds of laughter and talking. And nothing else. L.A.'s subtly oppressive white noise — its cars, trucks and buses — was eerily gone. People kept pausing in delight to hear what wasn't there. All motors and engines were banned from the route.
The air felt lighter, as if the city itself had ascended high above the clouds. It was just a few hours on a Sunday, but it felt like a new chapter in L.A. history. "Open street" initiatives have been around at least since 1965, with Seattle's Bicycle Sundays. The event migrated to New York City, San Francisco and Ottawa before showing up in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1974. They called it "Ciclovía," a portmanteau combining "cycle" and "way." Somehow in Bogotá, a crime-ridden city of fierce traffic, Ciclovía took root in a way it hadn't in North American cities. It has since become an institution, held every Sunday, spanning roughly 75 miles. On this single day, as many as 1 million Colombians use the route for everything from parades, protests and performances to simply running errands. In 2007, Clarence Eckerson Jr., a 40-year-old, New York–based videographer, flew to Bogotá, made a nine-minute documentary about Ciclovía and posted it on the website Streetsblog. Bicycle activists around the country watched the video and wondered, Why not here?
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