Shortly after brushfires in June raced up San Gabriel Canyon north of Azusa, threatened a Duarte neighborhood and fouled the air, Bike SGV agreed with first responders to cancel its open streets event.

Now, three months later, 626 Golden Streets has been rescheduled for March 5, the one-year anniversary of the Gold Line Foothill Extension from Pasadena to the Azusa/Glendora border, said Wes Reutimann, executive director of Bike San Gabriel Valley.

Selected streets in eight cities will be closed on that Sunday for people to walk, jog, skate and bike.

Though his group preferred to hold the event this fall, not all of the cities involved would agree. Metro liked the idea of coordinating with its successful Gold Line extension’s birthday, he said.

As to the weather in March? Not being fire season is a plus. But Reutimann said he won’t make any out-on-the-limb forecast predictions.

“It will be cooler,” he said.

Organizers feel confident that this time they can pull off the longest open streets event ever staged in the United States.

“We are ready to roll. Everything is lined up,” he said.

The group will recoup money lost in June with an extra $200,000 in funding from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Metro will help stage the $393,600 event through eight cities along 19 miles of closed streets following the path of the light-rail line from South Pasadena to Azusa.

Metro is also scheduled to spend $4.1 million on 17 new open street events in 2017 and 2018 in an effort to get cars off the roads and introduce commuters to bikes and mass transit, such as buses, trains and ridesharing services.

The Metro board will vote on the open streets expenditure plan on Thursday.

Metro is piggybacking off the first CicLAvia event held on Oct. 10, 2010, that drew thousands of bike riders, skateboard riders and pedestrians onto streets closed to cars in Los Angeles.

With nearly twice the funding spent by Metro on events from 2014-15, open streets will spread to Burbank, Downey, Culver City, downtown Los Angeles, Baldwin Park, the San Gabriel River Bike Path, Glendale, Santa Monica, San Fernando, Long Beach, Whittier, Montebello, San Dimas and San Pedro mostly next year and in 2018.

Some of the largest grants will go to the CicLAvia: Route 66 event planned for Claremont, San Dimas and Pomona at a cost of $596,000, according to Metro. The next highest are: CicLAvia events in downtown L.A. next fall and in the winter of 2018, each costing $312,800.

Reutimann said the San Gabriel Valley Golden Streets event is more complicated because it must get approvals from multiple cities.

CicLAvia events have awakened people who drive automobiles to consider nonpolluting means of transportation, said Carol Freucht, communications director for Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. The CicLAvia website says particulate pollution drops 20 percent during events.

“We have heard from people who dusted off their bikes and hadn’t ridden for years,” she said. “They’d ride in an event and say ‘hey, 10 minutes is not that long,’ ” she said.

“These events are a gateway for people to realize the possibilities” of getting around town without a car, Freucht said.