CicLavia declared a success; planning underway for 2014
Organizers of Sunday’s CicLAvia festival estimated that more than 100,000 people turned out to bike, walk, run and roller-skate along 7 ½ miles of downtown streets that were closed to cars for the event.
No major incidents or injuries were reported, though because of temperatures reaching the low 90s and because of low humidity, organizers had to remind people to drink plenty of water and stay hydrated.
Sunday’s car-free event, dubbed Heart of LA, was the third this year and the eighth since CicLAvia began in 2010 in downtown Los Angeles. The aim is to get Angelenos to abandon their vehicles for the day and rediscover their city in other ways.
“We came back to where we started it all,” said Robert Gard, a CicLAvia spokesman. “People seemed to really like coming back to these streets downtown that they now know and love.”
Organizers are still finalizing plans for 2014, but Gard said they hoped to put on four throughout the year, with the first in April along Wilshire Boulevard.
Although CicLAvia is best known as an attraction for cyclists, Gard said it has become increasingly popular for those on foot.
“More and more people are seeing it as a pedestrian event and taking advantage of that,” he said. “We still had tens of thousands of bicycles out there, but we saw people embracing it as both a pedestrian and a cycling event.”
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