Way to go Miami!
Last Sunday, over 1,000 people biked, walked, ran and skated on car-free streets in downtown Miami — Ciclovía-style.
Bike Miami is an initiative by City of Miami Mayor Manny Diaz to promote bicycling, liveable streets and the growing urban neighborhood of Downtown Miami. Because of the success and enthusiasm of participants, Miami will be making this a monthly event! The next one will be December 14.
For more stories, photos and video, see Bike Miami’s blog and Spokes-n-Folks.
Hello, Orlando? …
Hello Orlando indeed!!
Thought about this kind of thing — more specifically “Bike to Work Day”. Day!!?? We need this “day” to happen every month of the year!!
I’d love to add “Hello, Daytona” but there isn’t any really central location for this town that would make sense. I suppose many years ago there was a downtown, in the same manner as Orlando and Miami, but it’s just one miserable spread of roads, businesses and stuff. So sad.
It is encouraging to see that it will be a monthly event and perhaps if the downtown merchants benefit, they could get higher frequencies pushed through.
Several variations of this idea have been proposed for Orlando’s celebration of Bike Month Florida 2009. It’s a lot of work and, I’m told, requires persistence and salesmanship with city officials. But clearly the benefits are widespread.
Many moons ago, Orlando held the Great Orlando Bike Ride (Goober) which was quite well attended. It was not a particularly high-exertion event, as the ride was speed limited to 12 mph, but we’ve attended it as a social gathering. At one point, there were 1200 riders traveling through and around downtown Orlando. I would be willing to burn dinosaurs to attend another similar event. I’ll keep an eye out for the 2009 calendar!
Oh, yeah, there’s an eight second clip of the start of the Goober, with my wife and I on our (now-sold) back-to-back recumbent tandem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU2xBBNzeuE