Car Free Day in Gastown

Cars are funny things. We drive them. We ride in them. We love them. We pay for them. We buy them gas. We breathe their exhaust. We pay for them again. We build our cities and laws around them. We believe that they are a normal, acceptable, or even necessary chunk of society or life. But is it really so? Car Free Day is an opportunity for you and your friends, your elders, and your children to question why a life without cars too oft considered "outside of the box."

Car Free Day will be a day when Vancouver will join 1,500 other cities and 100 million people worldwide in celebration of International Car Free Day. Touristy Gastown will doubtlessly have less tourists and more locals as two of its main roads are closed off to the offending vehicles to make way for music, art, families, and entertainment. Theatre performances, sword fights, BMX demos... I personally recommend you to don a helmet and check out the Pedal Play Peddling Zoo, which if it's at all reminiscent to the one at the Commercial Drive Car Free Festival, will be sheer adrenaline-kicking madness!

Face it, people. In our fair Olympics-destined city, cars and roadways are shaping our lives more than we're shaping them. This city is already swimming in traffic, barely able to keep its Olympics-destined nose out of the waters. Car Free Day is a good time to explore our alternatives more seriously, and also to not be serious at all. Bikes, skateboards, rollerblades etc. aren't serious: they're fresh, fun, and so so sexy.