Car Free Day celebrates the vibrancy of Vancouver’s diverse neighbourhoods by organizing a multi-site annual arts and culture festival that reclaims traffic thoroughfares as community focused public spaces. This allows artists, local residents, performers, artisans, non-profits, and businesses to interact, engage, and re-imagine spaces normally reserved for vehicle traffic. We continue to be a green and grassroots effort, directed and organized by the local residents in each Car Free Day neighbourhood.

Car Free Day Vancouver began in Grandview-Woodlands with concerns over the Gateway highway widening project and the effects of increasing automobile traffic in the neighbourhood. In the place of traditional protest, the founders of Car Free Commercial Drive created a street festival where those from the neighbourhood could be engaged to rethink the range of uses for neighbourhood streets.

Since 2008, the Car Free Vancouver Society has helped communities in the West End, Main Street, and Kitsilano neighbourhoods put on their own festivals. Keeping to the spirit of the original Car Free Days, each festival is produced by members from these neighbourhoods and thus reflects the talents, aspirations and culture particular to these communities.

Car Free Day continues to grow in popularity as measured by attendance, footprint and by the numerous ‘best of’ awards from local media including The Georgia Straight, the Vancouver Courier, and the WestEnder.

Car Free Day remains an almost exclusively volunteer run street festival and gratefully acknowledges the help we have received from the City of Vancouver, local artists, our neighbourhood businesses and BIAs, our sustainability partners Vancity, Translink, and Portable Electric, and most of all from the hundreds of neighbourhood volunteers.

Interesting learning more and participating in this year’s street festivals?

Check out our up-to-date list of Car-Free Day events