When the Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension opened in early March, San Gabriel Valley residents finally had another way to get around besides the automobile.
But that wasn’t enough for Michael Cacciotti and Wesley Reutimann. Both avid bicycle riders, they’re planning a day when automobiles are verboten within the lanes of several major streets stretching 18 miles — albeit for six hours on Sunday, June 26.
During the ambitious ciclovia-type event called 626 Golden Streets, parts of Mission, Garfield, Huntington, Colorado, Duarte and Foothill will be open only to bicyclers, walkers, joggers and other folks riding non-motorized conveyances. The jagged, east-west route hugs the Gold Line from South Pasadena through San Marino, Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Irwindale to Azusa near Glendora, connecting seven foothill cities and six train stations.
The point? To highlight the 11.5-mile light-rail extension and promote a third way: riding a bicycle.
“It serves to introduce people to other modes of transportation,” said David Diaz, programs director for Bike San Gabriel Valley, the nonprofit spearheading the event that includes Reutimann as project director. “It will show how easy it is for me to ride my bike down the street, to the Metro station, or eat at a business and come right back.”
This visual object lesson will be shown to a minimum of 50,000 people and affect hundreds of businesses, Diaz said. The event will showcase art, food, music and play zones at Gold Line stations.
The name “626 Golden Streets” includes a numerical representation of the date, with the color borrowed from the Gold Line. It is one of a slew of open streets events in the pipeline patterned after CicLAvia, the bike-riding phenomenon that landed in Los Angeles in 2010. The copycats are copying the original from Bogata, Colombia, still attracting 2 million people on bikes or their own two feet every Sunday.
Open street events are growing in California due to a burst of funding from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) and anti-smog agencies. Metro awarded Bike SGV $393,000 for 626 Golden Streets. When combined with a $320,000 grant from the Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee, a Southern California governmental agency that doles out money collected from the $4 per vehicle surcharge on annual registration fees, the event has been staked with $713,000 in event planning dollars.
Cacciotti, a South Pasadena City Councilman and board member on the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said Reutimann asked three years ago if he would support shutting down the Pasadena Freeway for bike rides like Caltrans did in 2003. Cacciotti had a different vision. Instead of riding on a freeway, he wanted to highlight bicycling and taking the train, a two-fer in alternative transportation.
A study published by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health found ultrafine particles, a component of smog, were reduced by 21 percent and other particulates were reduced by 49 percent along the route of a 2014 CicLAvia.
Other studies found a 10 percent boost in sales among small businesses on the route during the day of the event, Diaz said. Some business owners were concerned about blocking access to their stores. For those, he said the group is working on providing signage.
“It is a way to bring people together — to evoke community,” Diaz said.
Cacciotti has been riding the route on Sundays for the past few months. Getting from South Pasadena to Azusa on bicycle takes 1 hour 20 minutes. Finding new places takes longer but is worth it, he said.
“We stopped and chatted with some people at a doughnut shop along the way,” he said. “We would never have known that existed if we hadn’t gotten on our bikes.”
Cacciotti, who rides his bike and takes the bus to AQMD meetings in Diamond Bar, said commuters need to awaken from their ruts of driving two hours in single-passenger cars each day. Cleaner air, new ways to exercise, and fighting obesity and diabetes are some tangible effects. But sometimes the experience can be more than that.
“It is a freedom, a sense of adventure, a sense of exploration” that he hopes more will realize by riding in the 626 Golden Streets.
BikeSGV is holding information meetings in Irwindale City Hall Wednesday from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. and on May 10 at Crowell Public Library in San Marino from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. To learn more, go to www.626goldenstreets.com.
