Car Free Robson !

Car Free Davie, Granville and Robson Streets

By all means have car free days but please lets not have have transit free days. In fact lets pretend that these busy shopping streets were like this all the time and were carrying hundreds of people straight to the front doors of the stores and restaurants and maybe customers and business owners will get used to the idea and want to do it permanently. Then we can get wider sidewalks and streetcars.

I understand that it is unpopular to "rain on a parade", but these token days are not the path to change, and the carbon impact they have is oxymoronic at best. Closing a street doesn't diminish the use of cars for the day, it reroutes them. It can also mean switching from electric trolley buses to diesel, when the street closure is on a trolley route, and making transit less accessible by rerouting off track. Staging the festival involves engineering and police vehicle fleet use, in installing, manning, and dismantling the car free barriers. "Car Free" days confuse the line between municipal wide changes in infrastructure (bikeways, pedestrian friendly curbs and crossings, etc.) and festivals, while consuming City resources (staff, budget) that could have been invested in lasting, long term infrastructure. The time for a festival to raise awareness of change has passed into the time for action on the infrastructure for change. On a full disclosure note: it pains me to suffer car free festivals when the Commercial Drive pedestrian first initiatives have been stalled out for more than two years: we still have parking restrictions on the West side of the street daily to support commuter traffic, no speed bumps at our school crossings, no pedestrian light crossings near major senior and assisted living complexes, and the hands-down worse bike route crossings at 8th and at Adanac. It’s not that I’m against “celebrating an initiative”, it’s that I’m against a smoke screen to the sluggish and stalled out initiatives - the time has past for symbolism, give us our infrastructure: free and accessible transit, light rail, urban residential density supported by full service commercial districts, greenways, bike routes, fees for recreational vehicle trips and single occupant commuter use of bridges and tunnels, parking fees as detriments to multi-vehicle ownership in residential neighbourhoods, and a City with the word “pedestrian” in its Traffic Department!

And if we took that street and turned it into a "Green Education" opportunity with a fair (that moved every week so was a reusable fair), then we'd reduce carbon output, teach and motivate at the same time. If you set up a couple of idea stations where people dropped off ideas and learned from others, that would spread the information. If you encouraged people to bring small items that they no longer need, you could also make it a community swap, reducing waste and encouraging the reuse of products that still had some life in it. You could even have gardeners bring plants that they don't need in their gardens (food-producing especially) and increase the number of people producing some of their own food.