From the SF Bicycle Coalition:

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition invites you to join us in celebrating the six-year anniversary of the popular Sunday Streets program this Sunday, October 19 with a special bike ride with the former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia Enrique Peñalosa, whose leadership of Ciclovías inspired San Franciscans to organize Sunday Streets.

Bogotá’s popular Ciclovía program, which has now been copied worldwide, opens up 120 kilometers of roads every Sunday to people walking, bicycling, dancing, playing, and enjoying the freedom of car-free streets.

Learning about Bogotá’s success in allowing millions of people to freely enjoy the streets each Sunday for healthy activity and connecting with their neighbors — at a fraction of the cost of most city programs — was such an inspiration to us at the SF Bicycle Coalition that we led the organizing effort six years ago to convince City leaders that San Francisco needed its own Ciclovía program. Thankfully, we and our partners were successful in that advocacy, and today Sunday Streets is a thriving reminder that our city streets are not just for moving and storing cars, but also for bringing people together to enjoy their public space.

We hope you’ll join us this Sunday for a bike ride with Mayor Peñalosa, who has continued to be a staunch advocate worldwide for healthy, equitable mobility options, such as biking, walking and transit.

Details of the ride:

• Meeting at 11am at the Golden Gate Park Panhandle, at Fell and Baker Streets, near the statue. Bring your own bicycles.
• Pedaling about five miles, at a leisurely pace, along some of San Francisco’s newest and most successful bicycling infrastructure.
• Ride ends by 1pm at Valencia and McCoppin streets to enjoy the Mission Sunday Streets
• Press event with Mayor Peñalosa and SF leaders at 2pm at Mission Playground, Valencia between 19th and 20th streets.

On this sixth anniversary of Sunday Streets, the SF Bicycle Coalition calls on City leaders to commit to expand this tremendously successful program to benefit even more people by making it a regular weekly event connecting multiple neighborhoods, as in Bogotá and other cities worldwide. The benefits to our public health, our local economy, and a stronger sense of community among neighbors would be multiplied greatly by growing Sunday Streets.

We also applaud the tremendous work of Livable City and its many partners in running Sunday Streets, particularly the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, SF Dept. of Public Health, who was a core early champion, and other City agencies, private sponsors and community groups and volunteers who make it all possible.