CicLAvia Needs Your Help, Pledge Your Support on Kick Starter

The Kick Starter campaign for CicLAvia enters its last twelve hours in just a couple of moments, and they need your help. To earn any of the well over $10,000 that they have already earned through pledges, they need to raise another $1,655 by 1:50 A.M. tonight. That’s how Kick Starter works, you either meet or exceed your goal or you don’t get any of the pledged funds.

It’s rare for Streetsblog to endorse someone else’s fundraising campaign, after all we just kicked off our own “subscribe to Streetsblog” campaign two weeks ago, but there’s something different about CicLAvia. When we announce our own fundraising campaign, we usually accompany the announcement with a letter from a supporter explaining why they support Streetsblog. Even though they haven’t asked me to do so, I’ve written my own letter on why I support CicLAvia that you can read after the jump.

If you want to see an expanded CicLAvia this fall, or more CicLAvias in 2013, they need your help. Donate today to make that happen. After all, a donation today helps them access all those other pledged funds

It’s a moment I’ll never forget.

At the start of the 10/10/10 CicLAvia I was at the Hel-Mel start in East Hollywood. I was there early, and I remember turning to Carter Rubin and saying, “do you feel the energy in the air? It’s nervous.” Later I compared the feeling to sitting in the audience at a wedding when the bride or groom is late.

After years of waging an uphill fight for even the smallest of projects at City Hall, the energy among the gathered cyclists was more, “what if today doesn’t go well.” Later, then CicLAvia organizer now CicLAvia employee Joe Linton conceded that he had a nightmare of an L.A. Times front page picture of empty intersections along the route from a windshield perspective of a car sitting in congestion.

But about five minutes later, the anxiety melted. Even just biking down to McArthur Park in a mini-ride organized by Ross Hirsch for families, it was already obvious CicLAvia was a winner. Everyone was smiling and laughing. Kids waived as we went by, as though we were part of a giant four hour parade. On the way back to Hel-Mel, the same kids were playing a game of soccer in the middle of the street.

L.A. has been inching towards sustainable transportation ever since. Commenters like to point to an inattentive cab driver forcing the Mayor from his bike and breaking his elbow (of course, they just say “when the mayor broke his elbow”) as the moment that the city began to embrace building bicycle infrastructure. That may be true for the Mayor, but I think when the city itself did was at CicLAvia. All of a sudden cyclists weren’t the weekend warriors training in their spandex or the Midnight Ridazz running red lights, it was everyone.

CicLAvia changed the city. And a report in yesterday’s Streetsblog shows just how much work shows just how hard it is to make a car-free event happen. They changed the game. They change it every time they close the streets. They deserve our help. Make a pledge to CicLAvia today. They need it, and you deserve it.