This year’s Boulder Green Streets event will take place on Sunday, September 19, 2010, 8am-4pm. The route starts on East Pearl and runs from 15th to Folsom. Linked block parties will also be held throughout the city. Along the route there will be numerous zones where participants can watch, try, and get more information about a variety of activities, services and related community programs.

Community members of all types will enjoy over 50 different FREE activities, demonstrations, and workshops (many bi-lingual). Some of the activities that will be offered include cycling saftey, demonstrations and repair, cycling meet-ups for a variety of distance rides, running the route with a creek loop, walking tours of downtown, hiking meet ups, dance classes, yoga, martial arts, frisbee, climbing, a samba in the streets carnival march and more! You’ll find a lot along the route to keep you moving… good music, healthy snacks and new friends. “Experience” sustainability yourself and learn more about living well in Boulder.

Boulder Green Streets (BGS) promotes active, healthy living, sustainability and strong community. We do this by creating expanded public, park-like spaces through large-scale street liberations and linked neighborhood block parties. Extensive and free activity programming gets all ages, economic levels, genders and ethnicities out to play together to experience sustainability first hand.

Come help make this an outrageous, wonderful community program. Bring your energy, smiles, friends, kids, and pets and come be in the streets with us! With your support we’ll be able to grow the event route and/or number of dates into the future.

Boulder Green streets is a Ciclovia project. The most famous Ciclovìa (literally translated as ‘bike’ way) occurs every Sunday in Bogota, Colombia where an astounding 70 miles of major city streets are shut down and handed over to two million bike-riding, road-running, game-playing citizens.

Challenging the assumption that major streets exist only for cars is a powerful stance. As people rethink the use of public spaces, new ideas begin to emerge, which is probably why a number of U.S. cities have adopted the Ciclovìa concept. Across America, these events have been called Sunday Parkways, Summer Streets and various other names.

Ciclovia type programs go beyond addressing the need for sustainable streets but also give their communities a potential solution for addressing community health issues by encouraging citizens to get active. Obesity and a sedentary lifestyle represent major risk factors associated with chronic disease which is perhaps the single largest cause of death in the United States.