SouthEast Cities CicLAvia #17, May 15 2016

Yesterday on 5/15/16, CicLAvia made it's first appearance in the "SouthEast Cities", including South Gate, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Walnut Park, Florence-Firestone and Watts. For me, this meant many new experiences including riding the Blue Line for the first time and wandering in all of these cities/streets for the first time! Although the turnout to the event seemed decent, there seemed to be fewer people that attended from the areas along the Red Line (it sounded like the Gold line as well) than prior CicLAvias.  I never had to fight for bike space on the Red Line this event although the Blue Line was pretty packed, which is also kinda due to design/lack of space for non-people (and oh my gosh, some of the Blue Line stations are extremely narrow!!)

I got off the Blue Line at Florence where I biked with some other random riders to the event about 1 mile away. I expored & visited a few of the hubs before meeting up with a friend who I biked at the event with for the rest of the day. Overall, the weather was pretty awesome with cloud cover the most of the day and relatively cool, comfortable temperatures. Having such a long route (10 miles!) with sometimes pretty wide streets made the event feel sparse, but at the same time it seemed decently attended. We wandered off route a couple times to visit the Watts Towers, which are something I had always wanted to see, but it never seemed like the right time & to explore the LA River bike path a little.

I personally saw a couple bike crashes, but nothing too big and besides that I never heard sirens or saw anything else weird happen (some people were concerned about this, but I know CicLAvia has a pretty good safety record and they take keeping the event safe seriously.) There were a few times when we hit areas where kids, especially, were riding really crazy on the route and would speed head-on into a pack of people biking the opposite direction. I know CicLAvia can be super liberating, but it was concerning at times.

I really enjoyed visiting a new area, seeing lots of new art (this photo set ends right before visiting the Watts towers) and how the Watts towers seemed to have inspired so much area in the area, but also even small things on the storefronts were nice to stop and see. I feel like all my interactions with people were pretty pleasant everyplace I went (making friends on the bike ride there, good times with a friend, random kindness and interactions with strangers), although the car traffic was a little intense when we wandered off-route. I ended up hitting all the hubs and more, for a total of biking 33 miles during this CicLAvia, which is a CicLAvia record for me! Yay! Another wonderful day of exploring, biking and good times! Thanks CicLAvia!

Watts Tower hats!!

I really like how the car is inside and the people using non-car methods to get around are on the streets....

Another guy shooting film and Medium Format no less!!!!!

More Photos from this CicLAvia including Watts Towers!!!

More Photos from past CicLAvias!!!