The next time you hear someone badmouth all the New Yorkers here, invoke the name of Jessalee Landfried. She’s the reason we’ll get to ride our bikes, free of motorized traffic, over a mile-long loop of downtown Durham streets Sunday afternoon, and she’s only lived here since September.

Think about that. In less than nine months, she moved from the Big Apple, started a new job, moved into a new place, set up utilities — and thought up and spearheaded Bull City Summer Streets.  From 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday afternoon, nine Durham streets will be closed to motor traffic so we can bike, skate, skateboard, scooter, Trikke, walk — whatever, just as long as a motorized vehicle isn’t involved. It will be a cycling Shangri-La, if only for four hours.

“It’s patterned after an event in Bogota, Columbia, where 70 miles of downtown streets are closed to traffic every Sunday,” says Landfried, transit education specialist for Clean Energy Durham. That event, called a “ciclovia,” was begun in the 1980s by Enrique Penalosa, a Duke grad student, and has since been adopted in Guadalajara, Mexico, and various U.S. cities, including New York City, where 7 miles of Park Avenue, from the Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park, are closed to traffic summer Sunday mornings as part of that city’s Summer Streets program.

It was in New York, where Landfried spent two years studying alternative transportation, that she got the idea for Bull City Summer Streets. (My lead aside, Landfried is actually from Durham and is back here working on a masters in environmental management at Duke’s Nicholas School for the Environment.) Shortly after unpacking her boxes, she started discussing the idea with various community groups. Turned out the Active Living Committee of Durham CAN (short for Congregations, Associations and Neighborhoods), a grassroots nonprofit, was looking for ways to help combat obesity, heart disease and related health problems locally. Thus began a marriage and a marathon sprint to pull Bull City Summer Streets together by the start of the 2010 outdoor season, a sprint whose biggest obstacle would seem to have been dealing with the red tape required to close nine downtown streets to traffic on a Sunday afternoon.

Fortunately, she was put in touch with Durham Police Capt. Anthony Marsh. Landfried met with Marsh, showed him a video of what she had in mind, they looked at a map and he said, Here, you can do it here (see map). Further aiding the cause: a group of Durham reserve police officers have volunteered their time to man traffic barriers. And while you might think that the notion of pedestrians taking over the streets could freak out a local or two, Landfried said that none of the 20 or so property owners she approached about the event (she was required to get each property owner affected by the street closure to sign off) balked. Some didn’t fully get the concept, she said, but no one said no.

So on Sunday for four hours, perambulators will rule. They’ll be able to walk to the Durham Athletic Park (the historic ballpark will be open) and play catch. They’ll be able to visit the Scrap Exchange, which will have an outdoor cafe set up. They’ll be able to take outdoor aerobics classes courtesy the Downtown Durham YMCA. They’ll be able to shop the Durham Farmer’s Market, and they’ll be able to “dance, salsa, zumba, jump, skate, blade, bike, jog, walk and laugh” in the streets without having to worry about cars.

In addition to a day of playing in the streets, Landfried sees the Bull City Summer Streets as a boost for the local economy. “People walking will buy things in a way that people in a car never will,” she says, referring to the intimacy and slower pace of foot travel. To that end, she hopes some of the nearby businesses — restaurants, in particular — that normally close on Sunday will stay open.

Landfried wants to see Bull city Summer Streets become part of Durham’s weekly summer scene. She also sees it as a quick and inexpensive alternative to another popular mode of perambulating pavement, the greenway.

“Building a greenway is expensive and they can take a decade to build. This,” she adds, “is an automatic greenway.”

Specifics
What: Bull City Summer Streets.
When: Sunday, 2-6 p.m.
Where: 1-mile loop of downtown Durham streets (and three streets within that loop). The loop is made up of Fenway Avenue, Liggett Street, W. Corporation Boulevard, Washington Street, W. Greer Street, Foster Street, Hunt Street, Morris Street. (See map.)
Cost: Free.
More info: Go here.