Ciclovía

The new issue of the Merc will be landing at a drop site near you any minute now, and it’s all about bikes, in conjunction with the Pedalpalooza bike festival that kicks off tomorrow. The days ahead are packed with exciting bike events, with literally something for everyone, but my pet favorite is Sunday Parkways, which is gringo for Ciclovía. If you don’t feel like popping over to wiki-world, Ciclovía was started in Colombia in the mid-’70s, and is a community event happening every Sunday and holiday wherein huge swaths of major cities (Bogotá has the largest) are shut off to motor vehicles and everyone walks or bikes. If you can spare 10 or so minutes, this video lays it out pretty comprehensively:

One of the things I love about this idea is that it’s a way of encouraging people to get some exercise, with dance and aerobics classes in addition to the walk/ride/run encouragement. I also think it’s funny (is it bad that I think this is funny?) that when a Colombian congressman (and heavy smoker) tried to pass a restriction limiting the hours of the Ciclovía because it held up traffic, he suffered a cerebral hemmorage during the hearing and died later that day. Haha… heh… er, never mind.

Portland’s pretty proud of itself these days for its flashy Platinum bike city status, but our Ciclovía is puny compared to to Bogotá’s (or Guadalajara’s, Quito’s, Sydney’s, or even El Paso’s), but it retains many of the same elements, with entertainment (DJs, the Sprockettes), food vendors (so many), and yes, exercise classes (yoga, martial arts… I so wish the Sprockettes were teaching an aerobics class. Maybe next time?). Everyone I know is feeling so stressed out and beleaguered right now that this kind of utopic event feels like a lifeline of hope that the future can be more than a big pile of doo-doo butter. It goes down in N Portland on Sunday June 22nd, and you can peep the deets here.