CicLAvia Rules! How Bicyclists Made L.A. a Better Place

One of the original tragedies of Los Angeles is that it was denied a chance for major urban parklands when city fathers decided to reject (and effectively suppress) a stunning 1930 plan by the famed Olmsted brothers, creators of New York's Central Park. It would have created a vast network of parks accounting for more than 160,000 acres of green space in Los Angeles County.

That irreversible decision is still mourned by historians, activists and many other Angelenos. Paley instantly realized that Ciclovía could give Los Angeles something it most lacked: public space.

Photos by Gary Leonard and Aaron Paley

Photos by Gary Leonard and Aaron Paley

Details

How to Get to CicLAvia: CicLAvia, happening Sunday, April 15, is free. For a detailed route map, go to bit.ly/LA-Bike-Map. You may join the route anywhere. Take your bike by subway or rail to get closer. See the L.A. Weekly photo contest winners at bit.ly/CicLAvia-Winners. And for more info, go to ciclavia.org.

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More About

• Joe Linton
• Bogota
• Adonia Lugo
• Outdoor Recreation
• Bicycling

"The lifeblood of cities is the idea that people can come together," Paley says. "It's that chance encounter. [Public space] makes us all part of the city, in a way that going to the mall or driving on a freeway doesn't."

When Lugo heard about Paley's suggestion in Los Angeles — that this city copy Bogotá's "contiguous boulevards" — she found Paley and enlisted him.

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.

"It was a combination of our different assets that made this happen so quickly and so well," Paley says. "We all had different things to bring to the table."

Paley had hosted public events that drew hundreds of thousands of people. Villavaso, a traffic-engineering expert, knew all about shutting down streets and mitigating traffic. Parfrey, the DWP commissioner/environmentalist, had important contacts with nonprofit groups and City Hall. Colleen Corcoran and Joseph Pritchard knew how to design hipster-friendly branding and brochures. Joe Linton, bicycling advocate and resident of Eco Village, was a tireless, experienced organizer.

But it's unlikely the event ever would have gotten off the ground if not for Mayor Villaraigosa.

Parfrey, one of those grand connectors whose Rolodex ranges from hippies to City Council members to lobbyists, set up a meeting with two members of the mayor's staff — the cowboy hat–wearing octogenarian and deputy mayor David Freeman, and his No. 2, Romel Pascual, who has since replaced Freeman.

Pascual, an urban planner and bicycling enthusiast, was particularly taken with the concept.

"I thought it was a fascinating and challenging idea," he says. "We're talking about transforming L.A. into something it hadn't been before."

"Romel really put his reputation on the line," Parfrey says. "He really championed it. There were other people inside City Hall who weren't enthusiastic."

Later, the mayor traveled to the bicycling utopia of Copenhagen, where, even in the dead of winter, cyclists seemed to hold title to the streets. "I saw day-to-day bike culture in action," Villaraigosa recalls. "I saw how communities come together when they get out of their cars."

He ordered his staff to make CicLAvia a priority.

"He lit a fire under them," Parfrey says.

One of the things the mayor and other politicians liked so much about CicLAvia was that, at a cost to the city of a little more than $100,000 (mostly to pay for cops and traffic-control personnel), it seemed like a bargain.

"The mayor and the [Department of Transportation] feel a certain amount of pressure from bicyclists, because they haven't historically done that much," Linton says. "A lot of bike stuff costs money and time. CicLAvia is fast and cheap."

Still, many of the area's top bureaucrats — officials at the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Fire Department, the city's DOT and the regional transit authority Metro — were dumbfounded by the proposal.

"The position of the DOT is pretty much that closing streets is counter to what they're supposed to be used for," Lugo says.

"I had never heard of anything like this," admits Marco Arroyo, engineer for special events at the Department of Transportation. "With a marathon, you know beforehand how many people to expect. With this, you're just counting on people to show up.

"It didn't seem like something that would work out. But we went with it."

Linton recalls giving a presentation to LAPD officials, happily describing what a success the event had been in San Francisco, in Bogotá, in New York. A dubious cop interjected, "This isn't New York. This is Los Angeles."

One concept that department bosses at City Hall had trouble wrapping their heads around was the so-called "soft closure" plan — points along the route where cars would be allowed to intermittently cross the flow of bicycles and humans.

This was a radical departure from impermeable, traffic-snarling events like the Los Angeles Marathon or AIDS Walk routes. It made people nervous.

"The goal is to not shut down the city," says Villavaso, the lanky city traffic engineer. "If you don't allow cars to cross, the likely outcome is a lot of traffic, which wouldn't help us in the long run."

Linton and his staff of volunteers canvassed the entire seven-mile route, knocking on doors to let residents and business owners know what was coming. Many small business owners were none too pleased. They were used to film productions paying them to make up for closing the streets.