Emily Yetman, Daniela Diamente of the Living Streets Alliance. photo: Chris Zukowski
Emily Yetman is in the vanguard of Tucson’s new activism, but she is reluctant to take much credit and quick to furnish praise on those who’ve helped shape her vision. A collective brain trust of some of Tucson’s leading organizers have joined forces to forge the Living Streets Alliance (LSA) – a new advocacy group promoting healthy communities by empowering people to transform Tucson’s streets into vibrant places for walking, biking, socializing and play.
A graduate student at the University of Arizona School of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Yetman is LSA’s overall catalyst. Shoot, let’s be completely honest here. She’s a classic overachiever with the perfect personality for the job.
Yetman settles into her chair still buzzing from her bike commute and pauses in thought, “There were a series of other events that happened where we realized that there were a lot of people interested in walking, bicycles and public transportation, and there’s no organized voice…it’s also difficult to keep track of all the decisions being made about things that directly affect people and movement and the network of transportation here.”
So Yetman did what any graduate student would do in their spare time: organize a new non-profit. “I looked around the country to see what other cities were doing and there were a lot of exclusive bike advocacy groups, which was really cool. But we wanted something that was more like a vision, a more inclusive and full idea instead of one little piece of it,” explains Yetman. While LSA advocates for far more than bikes, cycling is at the root of its genesis.
Daniela Diamente races through the front door of the downtown YMCA with her one-and-a-half year old son Damiano, drops him off at day care and whirls into the meeting space of the Y’s board room, her “impromptu office space,” she says laughing, all without missing a beat.
Diamente is the executive director for El Grupo, a Tucson non-profit youth cycling team, and is the Event Coordinator and heartbeat behind Cyclovia, whose inaugural event last April received a Metropolitan Pima Alliance Common Ground Award.
Diamente, along with Yetman, the LSA, and for its second year under the fiscal umbrella of Bicycle Inter-Community Action & Salvage (BICAS), are gearing up for Cyclovia 2, happening from 10am to 3pm on Sunday, March 27. Distill the passion of these two extraordinary women, add a long list of official and unofficial supporters from the City of Tucson, Pima County, leading players from the area’s environmental groups and ardent community members, and the result is Tucson beginning to mobilize its community outside the confines of the automobile.
“Living Streets Alliance is working to develop safer streets all the time. Working together with car infrastructure to encourage people to get around all these different ways,” says Diamente. “Having a visible community event like Cyclovia where it’s free and (in this case) all we’re doing is opening up the streets so people can use them. People go – ‘Wow. This is great!’”
Living Streets Alliance recently won the contract to organize Bike Fest 2011, a citywide event promoting cycling as a mode of transportation by hosting activities that increase community participation and bicycling awareness. Bike Fest events kick off at noon on March 11, at UA’s Old Main fountain, with an organized ride with Mia Birk: former Portland Bicycle Transportation Manager and current principal for Alta Planning Design and author of Joyride: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet.
More information on Bike Fest 2011 and Living Streets Alliance is online at LivingStreetsAlliance.org. Details on Cyclovia 2 at CycloviaTucson.org. Find out more on El Grupo at ElGrupoCycling.org.
