During the recent CicLAvia, cyclists stretch as far as the eye can see on 7th St. from MacArthur Park into Downtown. All images by the author.
Los Angeles is a city of cars. This we know. Public space is few and far between, taking the form of long streets like Melrose Ave or the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Public-private spaces like the Grove and the Third Street Promenade create the illusion of a walking city, but most people first have to drive to get there.
But Angelenos are yearning for public space, and recent interventions are pointing at a way to create that space. The most prominent, certainly, is CicLAvia, a biannual event that celebrated its fourth installation this month.
CicLAvia is inspired by the ciclovías of Latin America, a tradition started by Bogotá, Colombia, a traffic-heavy city which shuts down streets every Sunday. In Los Angeles, this means shutting down over 10 miles of streets, stretching west from Beverly and Vermont, through to MacArthur Park, Downtown and Boyle Heights, with a north-south trail from Olvera Street to Central and Olympic. The distance pales in comparison to Bogotá's 85 miles of street closures, but as any Angeleno would attest, 10 miles alone would have been impossible to imagine just a few years ago.
It was my first CicLAvia this year, and it was stunning. The city that I grew up in suddenly felt smaller, more free, disentangled from the traffic that makes it so infamous. I could feel the city air, see the smiles on my fellow cyclists, gaze up at the buildings and notice details I never had time for when driving by. Key areas created an open public space on the streets for cyclists and non-cyclists alike—in MacArthur Park, for example, you could sit down, listen to live music, eat tacos, and just people watch.
CicLAvia's success has been a thrill to witness, but its ambitions and scale are also difficult to reproduce. Costing about $100,000, mostly for street closures and the accompanying safety presence, CicLAvia represents the extraordinary collective effort of a 13-person board, whose talents range from social media strategy to arts organizing to civil engineering. A recent piece in LA Weekly described the original founders, "As if casting for some kind of prisoner-of-war escape film, the group's initial members each had the exact higher-order specialties you would need to produce an impossible-sounding seven-mile, open-air, closed-streets, public event in Los Angeles."
CicLAvia raises much of its funds through donations. In a quieter section on the northern trail, a sign asks cyclists to text in a donation to keep the project going.