With Bush continueing his World Oil War, we must expand the Critical Mass Movement to include pedestrians and transit users.

The time has come to expand Critical Mass. In addition to bicycle riders, protests should include pedestrians and transit users. Why not organize a Critical Mass protest in Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego simultaniously? With world oil production peaking and preparing to decline, global warming and continueing air pollution in these cities, we must send a strong message that we can no longer rely on the Four Wheeled Plague for transportation!

Check out this optimistic article from a Brit living in LA and reporting in a British newspaper. He hopes that increased oil prices and direct action tactics will reduce the numbers of cars in the streets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,685286,00.html

QUOTE:One of the great banes of life in California is the Sport Utility Vehicle, the SUV, the enormous four-wheel-drive cars that are also becoming increasingly popular in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. They take up an enormous amount of space on the road. They clog up parking places. They use an enormous amount of petrol and do an enormous amount of damage to the environment.

Because they are marketed as a safe family car - that is, safe, as in killing other people in a crash rather than yourself - their popularity has grown. Most car manufacturers now look to them as a big moneymaker. Sometimes it seems as though every freeway is populated entirely by people in SUVs talking into their cellphones.

I remember several years ago when activists in San Francisco organized a Pedestrian Mass to go along with Critical Mass. The idea was to get pedestrians to gather at a street corner after Critical Mass passed and get enough of them to create a continual crowd of pedestrians crossing the street at all intersections all at one time, thus blocking traffic from all four directions.