[van-announce] April 30 Critical Mass
Critical Mass Vancouver
velolove at vancouver.indymedia.org
Tue Apr 27 14:56:48 PDT 2004
"What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we
can escape the destruction caused by cars." Tranzlinkx?
[ [ [ [ [ [[[PLEASE FORWARD]]] ] ] ] ] ]
Critical Mass Friday
This Friday, April 30th
5:30pm (also the last friday in the month of every month)
------------------------->>>
Meet at the Vancouver Art Gallery,
Downtown Vancouver, On the side with the lions
and the water fountain [Georgia St]. Next to the Lions.
Maybe the Lions will not be statued stone on this day?
Real Change.
o
O
O
"From being a luxury item and a sign of privilege, the car has
thus
become a vital necessity. You have to have one so as to escape from
the urban hell of the cars. Capitalist industry has thus won the game:
the superfluous has become necessary. There's no longer any need to
persuade people that they want a car; it's necessity is a fact of
life. It is true that one may have one's doubts when watching the
motorised escape along the exodus roads. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m.,
between 5:30 and 7 p.m., and on weekends for five and six hours the
escape routes stretch out into bumper-to-bumper processions going (at
best) the speed of a bicyclist and in a dense cloud of gasoline fumes.
What remains of the car's advantages? What is left when, inevitably,
the top speed on the roads is limited to exactly the speed of the
slowest car?"
Critical Mass rides, skateboards, rollerskates, wheels and parties
regularly on the last Friday of Every Month. The next regular CM rides are
Friday, April 30th, May 28th, June 25th, July 30th: 5:30pm.
Join us for a fun street party and serious reclaimation of public space
away from the tyranny of the private automobile. We ride independantly but
together, taking a different route sometimes... Depending on who is at the
front. There are no ideal leaders to tell us what to do in this life. There
is only you and me everyday trying our best.
O
o 0 .
o
"Fair enough. After killing the city, the car is killing the car.
Having promised everyone they would be able to go faster, the
automobile industry ends up with the unrelentingly predictable result
that everyone has to go as slowly as the very slowest, at a speed
determined by the simple laws of fluid dynamics. Worse: having been
invented to allow its owner to go where he or she wishes, at the time
and speed he or she wishes, the car becomes, of all vehicles, the most
slavish, risky, undependable and uncomfortable. Even if you leave
yourself an extravagant amount of time, you never know when the
bottlenecks will let you get there. You are bound to the road as
inexorably as the train to its rails. No more than the railway
traveller can you stop on impulse, and like the train you must go at a
speed decided by someone else. Summing up, the car has none of the
advantages of the train and all of its disadvantages, plus some of its
own: vibration, cramped space, the danger of accidents, the effort
necessary to drive it."
One of the simplest direct actions to end your own support for the War [in
Iraq for Oil this time] is to stop paying your dollars to the people
profitting from/creating this Oily War.
Bicycling rejects all that. Human Power is about local participatory
democratic solutions.
Ride your Bike for Peace.
Ride your Bike for Freedom.
o
o .
O o
o O
"Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the
alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. The truth
is, no one really has any choice. You aren't free to have a car or not
because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car-
and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal
revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of
the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not
even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los
Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built
by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out
along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban
landscape (a desert) says, 'These streets are made for driving as
quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through
here, you don't live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to
stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be
considered suspect of plotting evil.' In some American cities the act
of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a
crime."
"So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be
comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their
cars, it won't be enough to offer them more comfortable mass
transportation. They will have to be able to do without transportation
altogether because they'll feel at home in their neighbourhoods, their
community. their human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in
walking from work to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means
of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the
vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at
home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the
other hand, to be alone and sleep."
Friday's ride, will be a sprite-ly spring celebrating group having fun and
riding together. Do not forget that this is part of larger events. The
second June Critical MASSIVE: The 2004 Wheels Ride - June 25, 2004
needs 1002 riders and more, skateboards, skates, wheelchairs, pedal powered
bathtubs etc. Tell all your friends. Ask them to invite their friends friends.
This is all part of building for the much larger event: The Everyday.
o
O o
O
"'People,' writes Ivan Illich, 'will break the chains of overpowering
transportation when they come once again to love as their own
territory their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away
from it.' But in order to love 'one's territory' it must first of all
be made liveable, and not trafficable. The neighbourhood or community
must once again become a microcosm shaped by and for all human
activities, where people can work, live, relax, learn, communicate,
and knock about, and which they manage together as the place of their
life in common. When someone asked him how people would spend their
time after the revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done
away with, Marcuse answered, 'We will tear down the big cities and
build new ones. That will keep us busy for a while.'"
[ From The Social Ideology of the Motorcar, André Gorz,
http://rts.gn.apc.org/socid.htm ]
The future will only contain what we put into it now. We need to start
today to build the future we love to imagine. Bikes don't Block Traffic, We
ARE Traffic!
O
o
For more information:
http://www.bikesexual.org
http://www.monkeywrenchcafe.org/cm
http://ender.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/velolove
Hotline Machine, 604-734-1734
o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o-o=o
UBC RIDERS MEET 4-4:30 PM
in front of the sub or at the bike kitchen
for a group ride down to the art gallery,
conspire by phoning 604-827-7333
EAST VAN RIDERS MEET 4:00 PM, leaving 4:30 pm,
from grandview park on commercial drive for a group roll downtown
_ _ __.. .__o
- -_--.- _`\<,_
( ( (( (_)/ (_)
every bike is one less car:
0 0 0 O O O o o o . . .
The revolution has not just begun and will not end here. The revolution
keeps rolling. The revolution will not be motorised.
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