Celebrate Safe Streets And Family Fun At Ithaca’s Streets Alive! Festival On Sept. 15

Get ready to have some motor-free family fun in the streets of Ithaca.

Ithaca is gearing up for its biannual open streets celebration of “active transportation” – welcoming everyone from bicyclists, walkers, and runners to skateboarders, dancers and more – for BikeWalk Tompkins’ eighth fall version of its Streets Alive! celebration from 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 15.

Here is where you can go: Plain Street will be closed to motorized vehicles from Elmira Road to Green Street, and Clinton Street will be closed to motorized vehicles from Corn Street to Albany Street as the city’s Southside neighborhood comes alive with healthier modes of transportation and much more. There will be people and dogs everywhere and live music and food trucks and plenty of fun for children.

BikeWalk Tompkins is a great nonprofit organization that advocates for bicyclists and other healthier modes of transportation.

Several thousand people usually show up to have some outdoor fun at Streets Alive!. The turnout is usually big and spontaneous, especially when the weather is great, and the forecast looks almost perfect – sunny with highs in the 70s – so there will be plenty of fun outdoor activities available for all ages. People will be playing Frisbee, basketball, and street hockey. For the kids, there will be Hula Hooping, hopscotch, and jumping rope. (Adult participation in some of the kids’ fun is welcome, too.)

Victoria Armstrong, director of BikeWalk Tompkins, has described the event this way: “It’s light, it’s fun, but it’s also remarkable to see how much space in our community is devoted to travel and primarily motorized travel, which is necessary, but it helps us rethink how we’ve chosen to use this space and could we choose differently.”

Streets Alive! happens twice a year: The 14^th spring event was in April in the Fall Creek neighborhorhood.

“We continue to do the Streets Alive! events because people want us to,” Armstrong has said. She has also said a lot of people would be biking or walking if they felt safer. “What would it take to make it feel safer 365 days a year?”

That’s a great question.

Thank you for reading,

Jim