Watch here without subtitles.

After sponsoring Streetfilms of the first two CicLAvias, the open streets festival in Los Angeles based on Bogota’s Ciclovia, Streetsblog LA faced a dilemma: How can we continue to cover this event that draws over a hundred thousand Angelenos to the streets?  The answer: Make a Streetfilm that was accessible to Southern California’s large Spanish-speaking population.

¡Viva CicLAvia! consists of two parts. First, narrator Mara Corina Arellano Colin explains the history and concept of Los Angeles’s amazing open streets party, including footage and photos from similar festivals in Bogota, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Brussels and Miami. While the narration is a great explanation of the benefits and culture of CicLAvia, the soul of Social Impact Consulting’s efforts are the interviews with participants.

The next five minutes is a parade of Spanish speakers professing their love of CicLAvia.  Whether it’s the team from South Central’s Mendez Bike Shop, the traffic officer spreading his arms while explaining Viva CicLAvia, or Hollywood’s City Councilman Eric Garcetti; the broad smiles in the Southern California sun give a message in any language.  Giving people more chances to play in the sun is good for Los Angeles.

This Streetfilm marked another first for Streetfilms, a directly reader supported video.  L.A. Streetsblog asked its readers if they wanted a Spanish language film on CicLAvia, and when they said yes, the readers were challenged through a Kick Starter campaign to fund the film.  Needless to say, the readers came through.

“The NACTO Guide is a really important step for cities to say it is okay to be different than a rural area. We are not better… we are just different and we would like to apply these different principles,” says Chicago Commissioner of Transportation Gabe Klein.

Streetfilms brings you these highlights of the Chicago stop on the tour, where representatives from the transportation departments of NYC, Portland and San Francisco shared lessons from developing bike infrastructure in their hometowns.

Guadalajara, Mexico is showing how amazingly transformative a ciclovia-style road closure can be for its citizens. In seven years, their inaugural Sunday event Via RecreActiva has grown from just seven miles with 35,000 participants to 41 miles with 400,000 users every Sunday. It goes from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and covers six municipalities.

By installing eight bike racks, DOT created a “daylighting” effect, improving visibility at the intersection. The bike parking is much less intrusive than parked cars and helps everyone at the intersection see everyone else. Oh yeah, and now there are a dozen new places to park bikes without taking away any space from Smith Street’s busy sidewalks.

For another look at on-street bike parking, check out Streetfilms’ 2008 tour of Portland, Oregon’s bike corrals.

In his campaign for mayor, Rahm Emanuel pledged to make Chicago a more bike-friendly city. And in office, he set his sights high, aiming to construct 100 miles of protected bike lanes in his first term.

His team wasted no time. Chicago DOT installed the city’s first protected bike lane on Kinzie Street before Emanuel’s first 30 days in office were over. Leading Emanuel’s DOT is former Washington, DC DOT Commissioner Gabe Klein, who clearly understands the connection between safe streets and the health of a city.

Last month Streetfilms traveled to Chicago to speak with the commissioner, ride on Kinzie Street, and bask in the city’s cycling excitement.

And one piece of local trivia. The Blommer Chocolate Store is right on the Kinzie Street protected bike lane and boy does it smell good. It figured prominently in my all-time favorite response to an interview question about biking.

Walking and bicycling in Guadalajara, Mexico can be dangerous in many parts of the city, but there’s a movement afoot among many citizens to change that. GDL en Bici is a group of local advocates who have been organizing regular bike rides for years, and nothing is more impressive than their ride on the first Thursday of the month – the Paseo de Todos – which regularly draws up to 5,000 riders to celebrate and demand safer cycling conditions.

People just have a lot of fun. You’ll see families, students, and older residents throughout the crowd. Drivers who usually fill the city’s congested roads mostly seem to tolerate the inconvenience. The police largely ignore the whole thing. An added twist is that each of the rides has a theme. One month it might be to celebrate Mexico’s Independence. Another it could be comic books. Luckily we got to ride along in October, when it’s all about celebrating the Day of the Dead.

Streetfilms would like to thank Guadalajara 2020, for sponsoring the film and enabling Streetfilms to make the journey to document this wonderful event, and Gil Penalosa, Executive Director of 8-80 Cites, for organizing the details.

In the Dutch city of Utrecht, kids start learning about traffic safety long before they prepare for a driver’s license. And they pick up a lot more than just “look both ways before you cross the street.”

The school curriculum includes regular field trips to the local “traffic garden.” The City of Utrecht has used this facility, a streetscape in miniature, to teach kids the rules of the road since the 1950s. Students take turns as cyclists, pedestrians and car drivers, learning how to take other types of street users into consideration. The hands-on experience navigating the traffic garden gives kids the skills and confidence to get around the city under their own power as soon as their early teens.

Wednesday was International Walk to School Day. Among the 3,784 U.S. schools participating this year was P.S. 197 in East Harlem, where kids were joined on their regular commute by Grover of “Sesame Street” fame, along with other guests. Robin Urban Smith of Streetfilms was there.

Check out the vid for improvements near P.S. 197 that make crossing the street safer, and read about this year’s “We’re Walking Here” program from DOT, which offers schools a $1,000 prize for designing their own pedestrian safety campaign materials.

We’ve got a late addition to the calendar for our Boston-area readers. Streetsblog founding editor Aaron Naparstek, currently a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, will re-unite with Clarence Eckerson tonight for an evening of Streetfilms screenings and discussion. An hour of Streetfilms will be followed by a Q&A with Clarence and Aaron led by GSD Professor of Urban Planning Michael Hooper.

I’m not sure exactly what’s on Clarence’s set list, but hopefully he’ll follow through on the promo and screen some classics from the traffic-calming Sasquatch era.

The details, in case the graphic is giving you trouble:

Streetfilms Movie Night:
Documenting the Livable Street Movement. Moving Beyond the Automobile.

Monday, September 19, 6:30 to 8:00pm.

Piper Auditorium
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
48 Quincy Street, Cambridge

If you couldn’t be at Madison Square yesterday, not to worry — Robin Urban Smith brings us the video highlights from the big bike-share press conference with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, NYC business leaders, and progressive politicos.

Three years ago Streetfilms brought you a comprehensive look at Bogotá, Colombia’s TransMilenio, the world’s most advanced Bus Rapid Transit system. TransMilenio changed the way Bogotá residents think about public transportation, becoming indispensable to the 1.7 million people who use the system daily. If anything, the bus network became a victim of its own success, handling more passengers and crowding than its planners anticipated. Today, ten years after TransMilenio launched, we revisit this groundbreaking transit system and examine how it must improve as it matures.

After the jump, a reminder of Prospect Park West’s prior incarnation as a three-lane speedway…

The first cable-stayed bridge of any kind in the state, it’s breathtaking, even to the people who have been riding it for years. It provides a safe, continuous crossing and offers up a glorious view of the downtown skyline (especially at sunset!). The sleek Hiawatha light rail line runs beneath it, and there are benches to sit on and take everything in.

Used by an average of 2,500 riders a day, peak use can hit 5,000 to 6,000 per day on some gorgeous summer weekends, according to Shaun Murphy of the Minneapolis Department of Public Works.

The bridge was named in honor of Minneapolis’ Martin Olav Sabo, a former U.S. Representative from the 5th District who helped secure much of the $5 million needed to build it. Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation for enabling us to feature this majestic piece of bike architecture and to show that investing is cycling and walking is well worth every penny for our communities.

“When we build very high quality bicycle infrastructure, besides protecting cyclists, it shows that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally as important to one in a $30,000 car,” said Peñalosa. And as mayor, he walked the walk, extending the network of protected bikeways to every community.

Now the investment in cycling infrastructure is paying off. After starting off with hardly any bike commuters, Bogota is pushing a five percent bike commute mode-share.

Nearly three years ago Streetfilms took a day trip to Washington, D.C. to see their new bike-share system, Smart Bike DC, in action. We found the trial system a fun ride with great potential, but with only 120 bikes there wasn’t widespread use.

Flash forward to 2011. With more than 1,100 bicycles and 110 stations, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare is testament to the imperative to “go big or go home” when deploying bike-share programs. Currently the largest bike-share system in the United States, the District’s second stab gives users much more flexibility and options to accomplish short errands and commute to work.

In fact, the next phase of expansion has just been announced, with 18 more stations and 265 more bikes coming this fall.

The handsome red bikes are easy to ride. With one swipe of a keycard you’re off and biking. During the morning and evening commutes (and lunch hours) you’ll see the bikes in very heavy rotation.  But what left Streetfilms most impressed was how many people were riding them in full business attire in the hot and humid summers around the capital. If that isn’t a sign of success, what is?

Streetfilms would like to thank the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) for partnering with us on this project.

Choreographer and filmmaker Gabri Christa commutes to work on her trusty Dutch bike from her home in Staten Island to her office in Rockefeller Center, and to rehearsals and performances all over the city. On her morning commute, she catches the free Staten Island Ferry, meets up with friends, and then hops on the Hudson River Greenway to 48th Street. When Gabri’s daughter was young, she used a child’s seat to ride with her around Staten Island. Gabri loves that riding her bike keeps her moving, free, and discovering NYC in new ways.

Streetfilms would like to thank our dedicated viewers for sponsoring this chapter in our My NYC Biking Story.

Nice Ride MN is a hit. The Twin Cities bike share recently celebrated its one year anniversary in June.  And in July they started an expansion by adding more stations and bicycles to the network.

We talked with Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak about the decisions that went into getting Nice Ride MN off the ground:

You gotta go big or go home. You can’t put a few around. You’re hopping on that bike, it’s like a trapeze, you’re not gonna swing on that trapeze unless you know there’s another one to grab. You’re not gonna hop on that bike and cross town, unless you know there’s a place to go.

Thanks to the Bikes Belong Foundation we’re able to provide this short snapshot of the Nice Ride MN system, how it works, and where it’s headed.