On Sunday, June 27th, Downtown Oakland opened two miles of its streets to fun and activities—zumba dancing, circus arts, BMX bike competitions and performances from local musicians. Walk Oakland Bike Oakland (WOBO) partnered with the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, Oaklandish, Oakland YMCA, Cycles of Change, SPOKES, and other civic organizations to create the East Bay's first “Sunday Streets” style event. Preparations are in the works for another Oaklavia in the coming months.
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [00:12]
Walk Oakland Bike Oakland have put on this really exciting event today,
Oaklavia. We’ve closed down about two miles of Oakland Streets
to cars.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [00:23]
Celebrating the streets for people, doing all kinds of fun activities.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Brian Drayton:</i>
[00:29] We’ve got a auto free street utopia going on, cafés in the
street, biking in the street, families, kids, roller skates, people
walking.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [00:41]
Earlier today I did some zumba dancing.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [00:48]
I learned the Thriller dance. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [00:55]
And I saw some kids doing circus arts.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Karen Hester:</i>
[01:08] We’re enjoying the streets of Oakland and we’re taking back
the streets. It’s car-free. It’s wonderful. It’s
very diverse and it’s very Oaklandish. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Karen Hester:</i>
[01:17] Right behind us we have the amazing bicycle bunny hop. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [01:32]
Lean forward, pull the bars up to your chest, lift with your legs and
just go for the ride man, hopefully it all works out best. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Karen Hester:</i>
[01:39] It feels safe, it feels fun, it feels festive. I’m not
worrying about getting hit by a car.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Speaker:</i> [01:48]
It feels like kind of funny cos it feels like totally illegal.
It’s like I was rolling down the middle of Broadway, that can’t
be right. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Brian Drayton:</i>
[01:59] It almost feels illegal to be this free. It almost feels
illegal, that’s a shame. It shouldn’t feel illegal, it should
feel like our right, our natural born right to get out, take over the
street on a Sunday and have bike church. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Kassie Rohrbach:</i>
[02:12] So we chalked bike lanes on Broadway today to demonstrate the
campaign that we’re running to get bike lanes all along Broadway. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [02:19]
Tons of bicyclists use Broadway everyday for their commute between Downtown
Oakland and North Oakland, and yet there’s not a continuous designated
bike lane to make sure that there’s kind of a clear place for bicyclists. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Kassie Rohrback:</i>
[02:30] Wouldn’t that be nice if they could ride this lane all the
time? </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Dave Campbell:</i>
[02:35] Today we’re doing a Parklets for People demonstration here
in Old Oakland, showing how businesses can creatively reuse the space
in front of their stores, to create community space, to expand their
businesses, and generally to make the streets a more lively, comfortable
place for people to spend some time, enjoy their neighbourhoods. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Erik Jensen:</i> [02:53]
We’re taking over the parking spots, so what’s normally going to
be used by a car to sit for, you know, a couple of hours and deliver
one person to an area, is repurposed and turned into a place that dozens
of people can use for any number of creative outlets.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Carli Paine:</i> [03:08]
It’s a lot of work but we’ve done it on a pretty narrow budget and
it seems to be really successful. People are asking us when’s
the next one? Is this going to happen monthly? That to me
is a success. </font> <br></p>
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