Summer of Ciclovia

Today marks the Summer Solstice and the bike rage of the summer is the Ciclovia a weekend morning closing of arterial urban streets.

• This Sunday Portland, OR hosts its first Sunday Parkways
  
• New York's Summer Streets 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. on three consecutive Saturdays in August, the 9th, 16th and 23rdt.
• Also in August Chicago will launch its Sunday Parkways festivals - monthly through October.
  
• Baltimore will host Sunday Streets for 4 weekends in October.
• Last year El Paso hosted the first Ciclovias in the US in May 2007.

A possibility in Philadelphia would be to look at the inner lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway, you could use Race St to connect the closed MLK Drive to Penns Landing and the Ben Franklin Bridge Walkway.



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Even without extending the street closings the MLK Drive closing is highly underutilized. What makes ciclovia's different from the park closure is that ciclovias have designated vending areas, yoga, dancing and aerobics classes as well as other forms of entertainment. Those empty parking areas would be perfect locations for that. Perhaps we will be able to extract some ideas from our urban neighbors to the north and south.

Ciclovia Philadelphia 2009!