How to drive drivers crazy: Car-free day slows down Queen Street
The National Post, Sept 29, 2007

On Queen Street West last Saturday afternoon, a band started to play. The stage was a parking space. The audience was made up of pedestrians, car drivers and bicyclists who were making their way along the busy strip. A singer sang bluesy vocals into a microphone propped up on an orange traffic pylon, while a saxophonist sitting on the edge of the curb wailed away. When a car going by honked it's horn, band member Michael Louis Johnson responded with a intense blast from his trumpet.

This peculiar form of protest, meant to celebrate World Car Free Day, is called a "parking meter party." The idea is to take back a bit of city space that is devoted to cars — 6 by 12 feet, to be exact — by paying for a parking space and using it for another purpose. Along the strip stretching from Bathurst Street to Strachan Avenue last Saturday, parking spaces were temporarily transformed into a screen-printing workshop, a bike repair shop, a disco party, a dance venue, a painting studio and a hair salon.

"We're breathing life and culture back into a space normally dominated by the automobile," says Johnson, a member of the activist group Streets are for People. The organization started throwing parking meter parties on Queen Street three years ago, after the city refused to close the street to traffic for World Car Free Day.

During the event, a parking spot in front of Trinity Bellwoods Park was used to park a dead Grand Am which had a petition painted on it's windshield calling for more bike lanes and public transit. Passerbys signed their names on the car with black markers. Around 7 p.m., several people pushed the car into the road, launching an unauthorized street parade down Queen Street to Old City Hall. Around 150 protesters — walking, cycling and skateboarding — allowed streetcars to pass, but cars had to wait behind the slow moving procession.

The parade was met by blanks stares from many drivers and streetcar riders, but also, cheers and thumbs up. "Watch the looks on people's faces," said Councillor Adam Vaughan, who was taking part in the parade. "Even people in cars that are backed up are smiling."