Imagine Los Angeles without cars. A town where people ride their bikes and walk in the streets and the smells of tacos and veggie burgers drift through the air instead of exhaust.

Sound like a pipe dream? Not if a group called cicLAvia is successful. A volunteer coalition of bicycle advocates, transportation experts, artists and academics, cicLAvia wants to make Sundays in Los Angeles virtually car-free -- transforming the city's streets into giant bike lanes and creating a public space that connects every neighborhood in the city.

"This city is so park poor, and so car dependent," says cicLAvia member and director of the Green L.A. Institute Jonathan Parfrey. "Air pollution is awful and childhood obesity is epidemic. But building new parks for people to get out of their cars and exercise can be prohibitively expensive. We want to create public space using the infrastructure we already have - our roads."

The idea, called a "ciclovia," isn't new. A phenomenon across Latin America, the ciclovia was born in the Colombian city of Bogota 30 years ago. Car-choked and polluted, Bogota's geography and sprawl very much mirrors that of Los Angeles. But every Sunday in Bogota, the city's major avenues are shut down to cars and hundreds of thousands of cyclists take to the streets. CicLAvia wants to replicate that success in Los Angeles - a city not exactly known for being bicycle-friendly.

"It can be scary out there," admits cicLAvia's Adonia Lugo, a PhD anthropology candidate at UC Irvine studying bicycle culture in the Southland. "Los Angeles has a very strong bike culture, but I think the casual rider has the perception that this is a dangerous city for cycling."

"I think the best thing about a ciclovia is that it would give people a chance to try biking, without having to feel like they're risking their lives as soon as they leave the driveway," Lugo adds. "This would give people a safe space to travel around their neighborhoods without using a car."
The above was taken from the Los Angeles Times.

The plan of this is hoping to have a test ride tried out in Spring 2010. Let's keep our fingers crossed for this!!!