Angelenos ride down Wilshire Boulevard during June's "Iconic Wilshire Boulevard" CicLAvia.

Hundereds of thousands of Angelenos on bikes, boards and feet will fill the streets of Downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, in the eighth installment of CicLAvia.

For those who do not know, CicLAvia is an even in which major Los Angeles thoroughfare closes to automobile traffic, and opens exclusively to pedestrians and cyclists. The last event in June, closed Wilshire Boulevard from Downtown to  Miracle Mile. More than 120,000 people participated in the citywide bike ride, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Many see CicLAvia as a major transformative event in L.A.’s transportation history. While personal automobiles are still the norm, a passionate and powerful culture of car-free mobility is growing in Los Angeles. 

For example, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority is working on five separate rail projects, with plans to add more than 30 stations to the existing network by the end of the decade. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation is adding hundreds of miles of bike lanes to streets through its master "Bike Plan." Metro is experimenting with toll lanes on highly travelled roads like the 110 and 10 freeways to pay for transit expansion. And the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition is sponsoring (in conjunction with Metro) free "street skills: courses to the general public that promote safe cycling habits.

CicLAvia falls right into this growing trend, yet does so in a way that reaches more than the transit nerds and dedicated bicycle commuters. CicLAvia shows the average Angeleno that our city is livable with just two wheels, or two feet and a TAP card.

The first CicLAvia occurred in late 2010, after founder Aaron Paley successfully persuaded city government. CicLAvia traces its ancestry back to “ciclovías”, specifically a weekly tradition in Bogatá Colombia where, according to the New York Times, main streets are closed to cars, and opened to pedestrians. 

CicLAvia’s website explains, "Ciclovías started in Bogotá, Colombia, over thirty years ago as a response to the congestion and pollution of city streets.”

Any resident of Los Angeles is well aware of the suffocating congestion in our city. 

 “[Los Angeles seems] to be near that critical point where the urban grid is overwhelmed with the number of vehicles trying to get around and it becomes clearly more of a nuisance than a convenience to get in a car to go anywhere," said Jennifer Klausner, executive director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coaltion.

Considering the spontaneous parking lots that appear on city streets daily around 3 p.m., it’s hard to disagree with Klausner.

Bicycle commuter and USC Spanish Professor Lacey Schauwecker explains how other public modes of transportation can change a city: 

"When the streets are opened up open, it frees people to see the city in another way—not stuck inside their cars but amidst other people and fresh air. I'm so happy it's catching on as a recurrent event and assume that people are realizing how much better life is when you at least have the option to be car-free.”

Mayor Eric Garcetti publicly stated that he wants CicLAvia to be a monthly event. And to help with that task, CicLAvia recently received a $500,000 grant from the Wasserman Foundation. When asked by The Daily News, Paley replied that “It will help us to continue to grow CicLAvia.”

In 2014, Paley and others at CicLAvia have four events planned, possibly including one in the San Fernando Valley starting near the North Hollywood Red Line station.

An event in the Valley would likely be received tremendously well by Valley Bikers.

Anelie Rugg, Chief Information Officer at UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities, commutes daily from her home in West Hills to UCLA’s campus in Westwood on her bike. Earlier this year, she uploaded a video documenting her commute from the Valley to UCLA, through the Sepulveda pass. The video went viral in local mediums. Rugg sees CicLAvia as a boon to cyclists like her.

“I welcome events like CicLAvia to our communities that re-introduce the bicycle into our consciousness and into our neighborhoods as something that belongs," said Rugg. "Every additional person who pedals a bike along a CicLAvia route is one more person to reconnect with the joy and simple convenience of bicycling, and to be open to other cyclists.”

It’s this connection to other cyclists, convenience and sense of community that CicLAvia’s proponents hope to incur in every day Angelenos. Eric Bruins, Planning and Policy director for Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition believes that CicLAvia allows Angelenos to see the city in a totally new way, one not otherwise acknowledged from behind a windshield.

“CicLAvia is a chance for Angelenos to totally reimagine what streets can be. If you take out their principal element, the private car, and just explore them on foot or on bike then it gives you a glimpse of what’s possible if you reallocate that space on a more full time basis.”

Bruins’ views extend beyond just reimagination, however. From his perspective as a planning director, he sees the potential public policy changes that events like CicLAvia can have on city development.

“It shows what’s possible when cycling is separated from cars, and make it safer. Basically what we’re trying to do in LA is advance the level of infrastructure to what you see in cities like New York and Chicago, where you have cycling infrastructure," he said. "And CicLAvia helps people to understand the value of separated bicycle infrastructure."

To Bruins, CicLAvia is a great way to motivate a large number of citizens to political action, pushing for more of the infrastructure that promotes car-free lifestyles for pedestrians and cyclists alike.

It seems to be working, too. Los Angeles’ first separated infrastructure is slated to start construction in January of 2014, along Figueroa Street between King Boulevard and 7th Street.

And although the Figueroa street project is just one, there are countless other plans currently making their way to development. Projects like the L.A. River Greenway, Expo Line Bikeway, Sepulveda Basin Redevelopment and LADOT’s master cycling plan all have one common goal: promoting a more livable environment for those in Los Angeles who are fed up with traffic.

Paired with Metro’s explosive growth of its transit system, Los Angeles may be poised to become a truly 21st century pedestrian city. For the time being, however, CicLAvia is just an example.

See Also:

Neon Tommy's Guide to CicLAvia: Heart of LA.