Shhh…The Bikes are Coming
In case you haven’t noticed, people are actually biking in LA. From big events like CicLavia, to grassroots level efforts such as the recent People For Bikes filming, the city synonymous with cars is beginning to share some of the spotlight for its two wheel counterpart.
CicLavia
After having great success last October, Ciclavia organizers planned for two more of the car-free events to happen in 2011. The first of these was on April 10th, with a reported 200,000 to 500,000 bikers, joggers, and pedestrians who participated in the event that closed off 7 miles of roadway between Boyle Heights and East Hollywood.
I could sense the momentum of this event from the moment I stepped onto the blue line metro in Long Beach; about 10 other people at this one station alone were headed to the event with their bikes proudly next to them. Each station collected more bikers, and by the time we were nearing the downtown LA terminus station (that conveniently was on the Ciclavia route), the entire train was full of excited bikers. There were hoards of people that were biking, walking, unicycle-ing, even frisbee-ing, across the seven mile track that was sprinkled with plenty of gourmet food trucks and interactive stops. [Video from streetfilms]
People for Bikes Taping
Just two days after the highly-successful Ciclavia event, an equally powerful (albeit much smaller) rallying for bikes occurred in downtown Los Angeles. The group behind People for bikes organized a taping for their forthcoming “BIkes make life better” campaign. They created a really cool video animation that was an homage to the bike, complete with a euphoric world made entirely of bicycle parts. This video was projected against a large building while the crowd of bikers and supporters were filmed watching it. They plan on releasing the video in May, to coincide with National Bike Month.
The crowd (including myself) was pleasantly surprised to have the infamous Kogi Korean Tacos on site, and they were dishing out their addictive Korean-meets-Mexican grub for FREE. I guess the ‘hard’ work of supporting bicycles in LA pays off. I am still thinking about that Kimchi Quesadilla….
