By living near your job or working near your home, you can save hundreds of hours of driving each year, giving yourself more free time to do other th… - Andy Singer

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.

There are too many damn cars. I first recognized this in 1983, just after high school. A friend and I were unable to buy tickets for a rock concert on Long Island, New York, and had to sit outside the Nassau Coliseum for three hours, waiting for a ride home. Looking out, I saw seemingly endless parking lots surrounded by endless highways, streets and exit ramps, all of them filled with cars-thousands and thousands of cars. Amidst all this concrete, I couldn't see a single tree, a single bush or even a single blade of grass. Once I became sensitized to cars, I realized that almost everything in North America is centered around the automobile. This is true of architecture, urban planning, socializing and even the basic procurement of goods and services. We have become a society in which the simplest human gatherings, like going to hear music or see a sporting event, require thousands of motor vehicles and miles of asphalt. There are precious few places where you are not within sight or sound of a road.

This may seem obvious but it's important to realize all the ways our society consciously or unconsciously pressures us to travel. There are advertisements for vacations and travel destinations, pressure to work at places only accessible by car, pressure to purchase larger homes outside of town, and pressure to visit family or friends as frequently as possible. Travel is often presented as a way to make us happier, more relaxed and less lonely. In reality, all this traveling often makes us more stressed out, tired, and isolated.