April 10, 2011, and bicycles take over the streets of Los Angeles.
Well, they take over some streets, for a few hours.
But it was a beautiful sight.
CicLAvia (their blog is here) is 5 hours on a Sunday afternoon where automobiles are disbarred from certain streets so bicycles and pedestrians can take over.
The mood is festive, with bicycle bells ringing, riders smiling and waving to the police helping the traffic along, and everything from street bikes, fixies, cruzers, customs, trailers with children and dogs and every other manner of bike imaginable.
It was almost 8 miles of continuous streets winding through Los Angeles. One end of the route was next to Los Angeles City College, then south and east past MacArthur Park, through Downtown, over the Los Angeles River at the 4th Street Bridge to end in Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights.
Musicians played along the side of the road, food trucks, -and an ice cream truck!- sold their delicious food, and the sun shone down on a beautiful day.
It somehow made Los Angeles feel, not like a huge impersonal metropolis, but a community, where people pause to say hello.
Photographs of some of the riders, taken mostly on the 4th Street Bridge.
