Ciclavia 8/17 + minivelo meetup
I attended Ciclavia in Culver City and Venice this past weekend! Ciclavia is an open streets event in LA modeled after Ciclovia, the long-running open streets event in Bogotá. The event is officially styled "CicLAvia", for Los Angeles, and it's a bit less expansive than Bogota's program... but still extremely highly attended! Whenever you go to one of these events, you can tell that LA is hungry for open streets events, and if they threw more of these, people would definitely participate.
This most recent Ciclavia took place near my part of town, in Culver City and Venice. It followed this 6.75-mile route:
Furthermore, I had the pleasure of being invited to a minivelo meetup at this event! There were some real cool and unusual minivelos there... like this Bianchi minivelo with an original dynamo light:
And these two different Picnicas. The one on the left is incredibly cool. The guy riding it told us he'd been riding it since he was in high school in Japan, and had replaced every single part by this point:
There were multiple people with custom titanium frames, including this one I'd seen on reddit before. It's amazing in person:
It was tons of fun to ride some of these minivelos around. It's always strange to ride a bike set up for another person's body - makes you think about why you've made the choices you've made about your bike and the parts you've slapped on it. I also got to see some cool choices other people made that I might just adopt myself. I rarely use my drops on my minivelo... maybe I should swap the bar out for bullhorns. There was a cool bike here with a Sturmey Archer 2-speed hub that I've never tried out before, too.
I love working on bikes and it was great to come away with some cool new ideas! And damn, if you own a Picnica... I'm jealous! They're incredible little machines!!