A few months ago, I wrote in awe of Madison, Wisconsin. With a little help from local advocates, the city hosted an open streets event that closed off popular roads to cars and drew 50,000 cyclists and pedestrians to fill the space with a community-building celebration of active transportation.
Well, I hadn’t seen nothing yet.
Yesterday, Los Angeles hosted it’s first open streets event of 2011 and hundreds of thousands of folks showed up to pedal and play on the liberated pavement. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to partake of the festivities — but my boss, Jeff Miller, president of the Alliance for Biking & Walking, sent me a report from the road. Yep, that’s him posing with Lance Armstrong. But, as he outlines below, the beauty of the event was the mainstream majority.
Here’s what he said…
“For more than six hours I soaked up as much as I could: the sun, the
connecting with their neighbors and city in a wonderfully unique and
natural way. Los Angeles is known to most of us for its tangle of
congested highways and smog from the millions of cars. But yesterday,
during CicLAvia,I saw an amazing city of cyclists!
Estimates put the crowd at 200,000-500,000 people and I think every
demographic was represented among the masses. Sure, there were plenty of
folks wearing lycra on expensive bikes — Lance Armstrong included — but
they were out numbered by the hipsters on their fixies, sporting
tattoos and U locks hanging from belts. Really the largest numbers were
everyday people, wearing normal clothes on a wide range of bikes. There
were small kids on scooters or riding bikes with training wheels; young
boys and girls on BMX bikes, parents with toddlers in seats and
trailers; couples on tandems (and a few tandems ridden solo with signs
offer the seat up for a small fee or smile); teenagers riding with their
cliques; men with long beards; ladies with fashionable skirts and fancy
hats; and people of every ethnic and social background together. All of
them were viewing their city and fellow citizens like they had never
seen it before — free of dominating and oppressive automobiles.
Cops were grinning with all the “thank yous” and reveling in the people
watching. Gear geeks were astonished at the range of cargo bikes,
antiques, high-end rigs, Pedersens, custom “big wheel” style bikes and
homemade, custom-painted bikes. Dozens of homemade giraffe bikes stood
over the crowds, but none more so than the four-frame-high beast
(including a tandem frame for the foundation) that supported it’s
cape-wearing captain 10 feet above the crowds. In short, it was a
bicycle advocate’s dream — everyone you could imagine riding back and
forth across the city, excited at the possibility never before conceived
and happening at that moment.
Open
streets events (Sunday Parkways, Ciclavias, etc.) have a magical
ability to open the hearts and minds of people from shop owners to
politicians. A hundred times the size of the biggest San Francisco
Critical Mass ride I’ve ridden, it has none of the rancor or
controversy. Kids have the safety and freedom to again play in the
street while parents admire and laugh. Couples kiss at red lights,
beaming with the joy around them. Families even cruise comfortably down
streets they never would think of being on for fear of gangs. And the
overwhelming threat of swarming two-ton SUVs and the noise and exhaust
they emit are distant enough to forget. Everyone is having so much fun
it almost escapes them that this is how it could be. Except it doesn’t.
Everyone gets a glimpse of how it could be. Young and old, thin and “not
so thin,” rich and poor, all connect and realize they have a community
they didn’t know existed. That is the power of the bicycle, and open
streets events like this help open the possibilities and prospects of
safer and complete streets.”
Click here to see Jeff’s pictures from the event.