February 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 13

Young cyclists enjoy a ciclovia event
in Berkeley, California.

Randall Hauser

having playground equipment and
climbing walls brought in. Musical
performances, exercise classes, sports
clinics, and bike repair and safety stations are other common features.

Car-Free, Carefree Streets
Ciclovia events open streets to pedestrians and cyclists
By Elizabeth Beard

hat do more than 80 North American cities now have in common
with Bogotá, Colombia? They all offer regularly scheduled ciclovia
( " bike path " ) events that draw thousands of pedestrians and cyclists
to enjoy car-free streets. Los Angeles (CicLAvia), San Francisco (Sunday Streets),
Chicago (Open Streets Chicago), Minneapolis (Open Streets Minneapolis), Atlanta (Atlanta Streets Alive), and Tucson (Cyclovia Tucson) offer some of the
largest U.S. events. Bogotá has hosted the world's largest ciclovia for more than
30 years, which now includes more than 70 miles of city streets every Sunday.
" Folks going down to Bogotá or to
other cities in Latin America oftentimes stumbled upon these open-street
events and asked around, 'What's
going on here?' " explains Mike Samuelson, member services and Open
Streets coordinator at the Alliance
for Biking & Walking, a coalition of
state and local advocacy groups. The
Open Streets Project is a collaboration
begun in 2011 between the alliance
and the Street Plans Collaborative,
an urban planning firm, to promote
ciclovia-type events, collect case stud-

ies, and publish best practices. " They
realized this is really a great activity to
promote health, to promote civic engagement and civic pride, to promote
biking and walking, to connect people
to other neighborhoods in their city
and to parks....They came back to
their city in North America with the
goal of starting a similar event here. "
Samuelson compares open streets
to paved parks. Most ciclovia events,
which are generally held on Sundays,
feature activities ranging from simple hula hoops and jump ropes to

Customized for Each City
" It's very customizable for each city, "
Samuelson says. " You may pass
through a neighborhood and you
may really want to highlight something about that neighborhood. And
you can use the support and activities
to allow neighborhood groups to play
music or hold a dance recital that
highlights what's really special about
that one neighborhood. "
Starting in, ending at, or connecting
between parks often makes for a natural ciclovia route. Portland, Oregon's
Sunday Parkways began in 2005 with
parks used to anchor the routes, and
each park hosted a vendor fair.
" What has evolved, and what we
did with a quite specific intention, was
to activate the parks with a healthier
focus, " says Sue Glenn, zone services
manager for North Portland at Portland Parks and Recreation. " We said
we want these parks to be vibrant and
active....We were missing an opportunity as park and recreation professionals-it's called 'Sunday Parkways'
and we needed to leverage exposure at
these events that were garnering hundreds of thousands of visits. "
The vendors were eventually moved
out of the parks and into the streets,
leaving the parks free for healthy activities that often highlight offerings at
nearby community centers. Although
the five Sunday Parkways events each
year are primarily organized by the
Portland Bureau of Transportation
(PBOT), the park department plays
an integral role in offering activities

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