Editor:
Cars have simply got to go. On Saturday morning, an out of control car went through the fence north of Marine and 23rd streets and almost destroyed Santa Monica Municipal Airport.
Why, if that car had burst into flames (it was full of flammable, toxic liquid) as it well might have, then the vegetation on the hillside could have gone up in a vast conflagration and fanned by the wind, jumped to the runway and from there to the hangars and other structures and to all the aircraft and endangered the students at the SMC arts campus.
There is just no knowing how much destruction might have been caused — Los Angeles could have been burnt down just like San Francisco in the 1906 fire. It might have become another Pearl Harbor! It is high time to get this automotive menace off our streets. Cars are dangerous and we don't need them anyway (they're just rich folks' way of avoiding healthy exercise). We have plenty of sidewalks for pedestrians and the streets can be repurposed for bicycles, Segways and pogo-sticks. The medians could be torn up and linear parks and dog runs put all over the city. Cars just cause unacceptable noise pollution and dump hundreds of thousands of kilocalories of waste heat into our already warming global environment and contribute to the ever increasing entropy of the universe which can never be reversed.
At the very least the City Council should levy a fee to enter or leave Santa Monica by car (residents included) which would discourage use of the transportation infrastructure just as they have done with planes at the airport. In fact, the City Council should form a "Motor Vehicle Commission" and, to avoid possible conflict of interest like they have done with the Airport Commission, appoint only people without cars or any germane knowledge to staff it.
Finally, I shudder to think that if I had been walking on that sidewalk, I might have been "runned over and kilt" by that car — it was right at street level! Since our economy and well being do not depend on automobiles, I say let's get rid of them while we still can.
Bill Worden
Venice, Calif.
