All photos courtesy of Pete Marchica.
Though many Long Beach streets closed on Sunday to allow runners and bikers to compete in the marathon, imagine having a day reserved when you could take a more leisurely stroll down the car-free center of the city’s most used routes. Not for a race, but just because.
According to Streetsblog (in a piece written by the Post’s own Brian Addison!) Long Beach is attempting to do that by replicating CicLAvia—Los Angeles’s extremely popular open streets event. But the question comes down to what all events come down to: money.
Started as a way to combat the car-clogged culture in Bogotá, Columbia (the then-mayor of which was hosted in Long Beach a few years ago), a ciclovía is an event where streets are entirely closed off to all vehicular traffic to freely permit bikers, skaters and walkers to roam the streets freely, traipsing through the city in ways which are otherwise impossible.
L.A.’s version this past Sunday, pictured in the gallery below, is its fifth time doing the event and attracted 100,000 people. It is not only meant to encourage people to leave their cars, but to show how alternative forms of mobility can alter the social and environmental landscape.
According to the City of Long Beach, efforts have been going on for four years in attempts to get a homegrown ciclovía-style event going. However, the absurdly high costs, mainly due to closing entire strips of streets while maintaining the proper police workforce to do so, has been detrimental to getting the project off the ground.
To read the full article at Streetsblog, click here.
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