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You might remember that after the recent Ciclavia event from Downtown to the beach along Venice Boulevard, USC professor Clifford V. Johnson had some constructive criticism — some advice to help the organizers of Ciclavia regain some of the day's mojo. The congestion was so bad that day that bike riders were forced to walk a lot or abandon the route altogether. Well, Sunday's Ciclavia along Wilshire Boulevard left Johnson pleased. He writes at Asymptotia, his blog, that his critiques had been fixed and the event was "almost perfect."
The route ran from where Wilshire starts (at Grand) all the way out to LACMA at museum square at Wilshire and Fairfax. I rode it with a friend in the middle of the day and it was a lot of fun....
You might recall some of the things that I felt the need to mention concerned me after the last CicLAVia. In that post I was most concerned about the narrowness of the route (they only used half of Venice for much of the way) and the fact that the resulting compressed group of people got even more compressed with the numerous traffic stops that there were. It was unpleasant and possibly dangerous. Well, there was not a hint of that here. They had both sides of Wilshire open, and relatively few traffic stops. This meant a lovely free flow of traffic for people of all speeds, ages, and mode of transport. The other main concern I had was that the event did not leave enough time for people to explore the route, leaving a number of people stranded, which is not good for a lot of people who are infrequent riders – they’ve got to get home cycling in traffic that they might not be ready to do yet. Well, today they extended the time by two hours, making it run from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Brilliant. I suspect that helped also with the potential congestion since people participating get spread out over a longer time.
Johnson has posted his usual time lapse of the day. Here are some LA Observed photos from the Ciclavia on Wilshire. My earlier guide to the route also has a lot of pictures.
Photo: Sean Roderick
LA Observed photos. Click the pics to enlarge.
