Car-Free Vancouver Day

Vancouver’s own Car-Free Day has been taking place since 2005, along eight blocks of a busy four-lane street where, usually for one day (two days in 2007), buses are diverted to adjacent roads, and a giant block party ensues.

The hugely popular Car-Free Commercial Drive Festival was the brainchild of Matt Hern and Carmen Mills (also a co-founder of momentum – “We love you, Carmen!”), and is now administered by the East Vancouver Celebration Society. The festival itself is put on by 300+ volunteers (and four traffic cops), and is attended by 40,000 people. The local merchants love it. It’s their biggest sales day of the year, surpassing even Christmas.

The key themes of the festival are “fun for free” and reclaiming public space. There is no charge to attend the festival and no corporate sponsors, although there are roaming “donation fairies” happy to accept contributions to help offset its costs.

Dancers, musicians, singers, poets, storytellers, stilt walkers, and DJs get the crowds hopping, and the local bike-art organization PedalPlay display their homemade freak bikes and invite people to ride them.

At least five other local neighbourhoods are interested in hosting similar events in the future, all to occur on the same day. With that in mind, efforts toward a Car-Free Vancouver Day, slated for 2008, are underway.

For further information, please see:

www.commercialdrivefestival.org
www.mightymatthern.com/evcs_carfree.html

About the Authors

Exhilarated after first going upright on a two-wheeler decades ago, Terry Lowe likes to ride up and down and all around, and hopes everyone else does too. [more...]

Paul Halychuk is passionate about sustainable practices. He kayaks, hikes, snowshoes, surfs, skis, and (of course) bikes. In his spare time, he creates fabulous giant flying creatures. [more...]