7 37 just about a half an hour ago, a large section of Georgia Avenue, northwest from Missouri Avenue to bury place close to traffic. This is all part of open streets DC, encouraging people to walk, run and bike instead of drive. Katie Carroll is live along Georgia Avenue
With a preview of today’s event. And this is always really exciting for people to not have to worry about, you know, cars when it comes to safety and, and walking and cycling. Good morning Marcel. Yet. This is really the flagship event of open streets DC. This is a three mile closure,
The road closed at 7 a.m. and we’re about an hour and a half away from everything getting underway. So set up is happening right now and I speaking with on a chamberlain with the dot Who was telling me? So this is the first year that you all are doing right behind us.
Bikes are coming out this bike giveaway. Tell me about that. Oh, this is, we are so excited, we’re giving away a and 70 bikes this time. And so there’s going to be, there was a raffle already and there’s still opportunities for folks who didn’t sign up to come to the event
To put in their name for the raffle and come later afternoon, anything that wasn’t picked up will also be re raffled again this afternoon. Oh, my gosh. And how was this decided? Because obviously, you know, the whole idea behind open streets is to close the road, get people walking,
Seeing their neighborhood making connections. But why was it important to include the bikes this year? Well, the bikes, we really wanna offer opportunities for our residents to have access to bikes. So some bikes are pretty expensive. And so we wanna make sure those who want to bike,
Have a bike and have the opportunity to do so. Wonderful and a so much going on out here, there’s gonna be yoga, dancing, music, so much happening. Many booths are gonna be set up and they’re getting set up. Now, tell me more about the activities happening today, as you mentioned,
Lots of exercise activities. So we have yoga, we have uh dance lessons as well. We have lots of musicians that are gonna be spread out the core. We also have roller skating classes. Um We have hot yoga, sorry, not hot yoga, boxing, all,
All kinds of things for fitness, um and just entertainment in general. Oh my gosh. And so these open streets events have been organized for about the past four years. We were talking about how popular are they? What kind of participation? Do you see?
Wow, they are very, very popular. Everyone wants one in their neighborhood. We unfortunately can’t do as many as we would like to do. Um This is our fourth annual, uh, we had 30,000 in our first one. Last year. We had hurricane winds coming through and we still
Had folks who came out to the streets. It’s just a really great opportunity, especially for families to just get out and enjoy this, like large piece of land in a different way. Oh, my God. So exciting. Thank you so much. And I really appreciate it once again uh that everything’s
Really getting underway at nine o’clock until 3 p.m. Today. The roads are closed out here at Georgia Avenue. So come check it out, live in Northwest Washington, Katie Kairos W USA nine.
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