Shut down a street to autos and sunny revelry instantly breaks out with lots of happy Californians. OK, maybe not automatically, but a key appeal of Complete Streets is that human-scaled throughways tend to be much more social than environments designed for cars.
Streetsfilms makes the case by chronicling the first-ever Ciclovía day on Oakland, California’s Broadway last week. Ciclovías, my inside sources at Wikipedia tell me, are walk/bike/stroller/rollerblade/etc. routes closed to autos, often for a day at a time, often featuring music, games, and Thriller dance lessons (in Oakland, anyway). The idea’s gotten a lot of traction in Bogotá, Colombia.
Here’s ‘Oaklavia,’ with hip-hop, cute kids playing foosball, dance lessons, and carbon-free transportation:
