I was thrilled to learn this happened in Los Angeles yesterday. I first learned of the ciclovia events in Colombia last year in my Elements of Sustainable Communities class at Walden University. So glad to see it take shape in the city of my birth. Here’s an article from the Los Angeles Times about the magic that happened in L.A. yesterday:
An estimated 100,000 turn out for L.A.’s inaugural CicLAvia event
For a few surreal hours Sunday, the car was stripped of its crown in Los Angeles and pavement was turned into playground.
Well, in part of the city, anyway. Gasoline still ruled most of the city’s streets, but on a 71/2 -mile stretch from East Hollywood through downtown and into Boyle Heights, there wasn’t a horn to be heard honking or a plume of exhaust to inhale.
Instead, a moving crowd that organizers estimated at 100,000 bicyclists, runners, walkers, skateboarders and roller-bladers came out for the city’s first CicLAvia — aimed at challenging widely held assumptions about how transit, exercise and the notion of public space play out in this auto-obsessed city.
The turnout and ease with which the event went off far surpassed the expectations of organizers, who had questioned whether Los Angeles could accommodate and tolerate the idea of shutting down heavily traveled streets for no other reason than to let Angelenos on foot and pedal have the run of the place.
Read the full story here:
Recreation: An estimated 100,000 turn out for L.A.’s inaugural CicLAvia event – latimes.com.
Journey from Copenhagen 