CicLAvia – Meet the Hollywoods – Open Streets Open Thread
On Sunday, tens of thousands of Angelenos took to car-free streets through Hollywood, West Hollywood, and East Hollywood/Los Feliz. The CicLAvia—Meet the Hollywoods 2026 open streets event reprised a popular transit-accessible central city route.
This iteration was slightly truncated a couple days in advance; the west end of the WeHo section was omitted due to ongoing work to repair a large water main break. The planned 6.6-mile route still extended an excellent 6.1 miles.
Due to Metro restricting open streets funding almost entirely to events tied to celebrating the World Cup, yesterday – the day of the cup final – saw three different open streets taking place in different parts of L.A. County. CicLAvia spanned the Hollywoods. Long Beach Beach Streets took place from downtown Long Beach to Bluff Park. Santa Monica held its Coast open streets event on several streets downtown.
(Unfortunately this means that between now and the 2028 Summer Olympics there will be few if any open streets events. But that’s another story that mostly played out at Metro last year, with a disappointing sequel this week.)
Open streets events have played a role in boosting soccer watch parties in public spaces. During previous World Cup tournaments, there has been a smattering of public viewing events, primarily in Koreatown and in Latino neighborhoods.
Yesterday’s Spain vs. Argentina cup final was a ubiquitous presence at yesterday’s CicLAvia. In addition to a large outdoor screening at Hollywood/Highland, the match was visible at numerous formal and improvised locations along the route. Audio play-by-plays in both Spanish and English wafted out of restaurants, and the booths lining the route.
The Sunday sun was blazing hot, pushing viewers toward the limited patches of shade. (For what it’s worth, along the streets on the route, the smaller city of West Hollywood has a more consistent tree cover than the L.A. City areas, though much of L.A.’s touristy part of Hollywood has good tree cover, too.)
During the noon-kickoff overtime-prolonged game – at the height of afternoon heat – the streets were less crowded than earlier Hollywood CicLAvias (see 2024, 2022, and 2019 recaps). Plenty of folks – on bike, on foot, on skates, etc. – were making their way along the route, but fewer than usual.
Personally, I am a fan of both soccer and open streets. I like the idea of combining public big-screen viewing with open streets. I suggested Olympics CicLAvias back in 2019 as an alternative to Metro widening freeways for the Olympics (Metro went ahead with Olympic freeway widening). During the 2026 World Cup, I made it out to two So Cal events that combined street closures and match-viewing (this CicLAvia and Park to Park) and one in Seattle (smartly nearby the stadium venue, the city closed several streets and publicly broadcast the game – leading to stadium crowds mingling with screen watching crowds). I missed the massive Koreatown viewings this year. Mostly I followed the watch parties vicariously through Alissa Walker’s invaluable coverage at Torched.
I still think that these combo events can work well, but sometimes there might be less synergy than one might expect. Neither Park to Park nor CicLAvia felt like they drew huge crowds into the streets. They did draw crowds… but, due to various factors (multiple competing events – including various fan zones and viewing parties in parks – combined with L.A.’s increasingly punishing heat waves) it didn’t feel anything like a double crowd.
Yesterday’s cup final went about three hours from noon to 3 p.m. in the middle of the 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. event. I hoped the streets would sort of re-fill as it concluded, and that did happen some, but not to the extent I expected.
Readers – how was your CicLAvia or Beach Streets or Coast experience yesterday? Do you think it has worked well to dovetail open streets with Men’s World Cup soccer over the past month? What worked well? What didn’t? How can 2026 World Cup public viewing inform 2028 Olympics/Paralympics public viewing?
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