Andy Singer Quotes

Whenever I look at a highway or parking lot, I consider what formerly existed on the land it now occupies and what could exist.

Space formerly devoted to human beings is now devoted to cars.

Cars are romanticized on television, in films and in popular music. There are thousands of songs, TV shows, and movies about driving, racing, road trips, and car chases. Just because something is romanticized, however, doesn't mean it's good for you. Alcohol, guns, drugs, and cigarettes are also romanticized in popular culture. But, like cars, they can be bad for your health or even deadly.

Like the science fiction movie The Matrix, giving up your car unplugs you from the Matrix of American car culture. From birth, you are unconsciously lured into the car and lured into seeing the world from the viewpoint of a car windshield. Fortunately for me, my father liked bicycles and trains.

I am an advocate for car-free cities, car-free city sections and car-free living.

Many people believe that America's addiction to automobiles is a cultural problem. The thinking is, if engineers, elected officials and the public were better educated about transportation issues, they'd shift the country away from cars and towards public transit and better land use. In reality, our country's automobile addiction has more to do with politics, government agencies, and our tax structure.

Basically, in America both political parties support policies that are taking the entire planet to hell but the Democratic Party is the slow train to hell, whereas the Republicans are the fast train to hell. Because I’m in no hurry to go to hell, I tend to vote Democrat (or Green).

For me, politics are a fundamental element of being human. They are the process by which we collectively interact with each other, resolve conflicts and try to solve larger social or environmental problems. There are family politics, neighborhood politics, local politics, national politics and international politics. Humans are political animals and I find those interactions interesting, amusing and important.

What are your main inspirations when drawing? The news, nature, other people, day-to-day events, music, sounds, art, everything is potentially inspirational. All you have to do is go outside, read a newspaper or watch contemporary television or movies. The cartoons write themselves!

The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the most inspirational book I've ever read on the subject of transportation and urban planning …but I lived in New York City and knew many of the places and people he was talking about. I'm not sure if it would be as inspirational to others. The book won a Pulitzer Prize when it came out in the 1970s. Caro was a newspaper reporter who wanted to write a book about political power– how it was obtained and wielded and what role agencies played in government. In describing the life of Robert Moses, a highway builder, unelected state bureaucrat and creator of the modern “highway department,” Caro was able to describe (in a microcosm) the transportation and political history of America. Another great book is Ivan Illich's “Energy and Equity.”

What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff? You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies. In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders.

When I graduated from college, I sought out the cheapest rooms or apartments I could find. One of these put me next to a freeway interchange in Oakland California. The experience of living there, biking everywhere and reading the book The Power Broker by Robert Caro, changed my life and made me appreciate all the issues associated with transportation. I saw exactly how and why the freeway interchange gutted my neighborhood and how the main obstacle and danger to bicycling in urban areas was cars and drivers. This was the early 1990s when many people were waking up to these same issues. I participated in some of the first Critical Mass rides in San Francisco and the East Bay and started giving them my transportation cartoons for flyers and posters. I also discovered the (now defunct) “Auto-Free Times” and Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in Arcata, California and started sending them cartoons as well. By 1994 it had become a major theme in my work.

After I did the book CARtoons in 2001, I got invitations to speak at various venues including The Village Building Convergence, bookstores and a few universities. Being a visual artist, I gradually developed a slide talk about the social, environmental, economic and political problems of transportation design in America. I used a mixture of cartoons, photographs and maps because I found it was helpful to give people real-world examples of good and bad urban design. When I got positive feedback from the talk, I became interested in turning it into a book and an interactive website. I still have to build the interactive website but Microcosm helped me create, edit and publish the book. My goal was to explain transportation design issues and politics in a simple way to college students and the general public, as well as put forward a few ideas about why I believe we’re not making more political progress at reforming our transportation system.

Cars are environmental enemy number one.

My obsession with cars is based on my obsession with the environment. Food, housing and transportation are the three big human and environmental issues. That's where most of our resources go and where most of our pollution is generated...Transportation is the big elephant in the bedroom that no one wants to seriously discuss.