Cities Are For Cyclists, Says Rock Star

David Byrne–that intense, herky-jerky fellow who sang “Burning Down The House” and various other songs you know from the 80s–says it used to be considered very uncool to ride a bike in New York. It certainly was at the time when, as a budding young pop icon in the early Reagan years, he adopted his childhood bike as “a principle means of transportation” around the Big Apple.

Clearly the world has changed in his direction. Today, tooling around a bit eccentrically on two wheels is almost expected for some cerebral young rock star. Maybe Byrne deserves some credit as a cultural visionary. But he definitely deserves credit for physical bravery, as riding in NYC at that time was a dicey business back then, with no bike lanes and no shared understanding that cyclists had any claim at all to urban asphalt.

After decades of urban cycling, he’s come to believe that cities are best seen and understood from a cyclist’s-eye view, which hits a perspectival sweet spot, “faster than a walk, slower than a train, and often slightly higher than a person.” The results can almost mystical, he says in his new book, Bicycle Diaries: “Riding a bike through [a city] really is a trip inside the collective psyche of a compacted group of people. One can sense the collective brain–happy, cruel, deceitful and generous–at work and at play.” And that’s without drugs! To share the insights, he has pieced together impressions, memories, anecdotes and meditations about cities he’s ridden through. The Bicycle Diaries are wide-ranging, but most speak in some respect to his central theme that healthy cities are cities that are bicycle-friendly.

There is a note of revolution in the title, you might note–an echo of Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries. A wink is intended, no doubt, but Byrne is also perfectly ready to discuss vast societal transformations, incldudinua hundred year plan for New York, for example. That said, the book is also appropriately calibrated to a time when any kind of revolution is bound to be a pretty complex and decentralized thing, necessarily infused with all the self-awareness and irony that an age of 24/7 media demands.

The revolution Byrne wants is one that creates and protects accessible, interesting, human-scale urban spaces–places where people can get around by foot or bike without feeling like deer during hunting season. He quotes Enrique Penelosa, the former mayor of Bogota, who worked a remarkable transformation of that city, speaking to this:

One common measure of how clean a mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find trout the habitat is healthy. It’s the same with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species.

Which is to say, if you see kids partaking easily and freely of a city’s public spaces then things are going well.

Byrne dispenses his insights pleasantly and personably. He tells stories of riding around to meet with notable people or see interesting cultural events. There is, for instance, a charming story of meeting a famous potter (i.e. clay, wheel, kiln, etc.) in London who’s a straight and married man but also a lifelong transvestite who dresses in custom-made MaryJane sandals and a flouncy dress. As in most diaries there is no lack of wool gathering or rumination (pray tell, David: how and why do we repress our thoughts?), but even the sections that don’t add up to a lot can be fun and engaging.

The diaristic stuff is though are interspersed with lay sermons on the virtues of good urban planning as revealed from a bike saddle. The introduction is a personalized 2000-words-or-less treatise of how the car destroyed the American city. “In most cities, we could say the machines have won,” he declares. This material is a bit predictable, but also generally correct. He also gets a tad reverent at times–the abundant discourses on race and ethnicity are straight from the “B+ in Cultural Anthropology” file–but he can also muster a pretty good sense of humor. For instance, when he was in Australia:

Shortly all traces of human presence begin to disappear, though for a while I can still get a cricket game on the radio. One wonders what could be more boring than watching a cricket game? Well, here is the answer.

What’s confusing about reading the book is that it’s exactly upside down. “New York City” is the best chapter and should be first for reasons of both structure and quality. Instead, it’s last. “London” is also excellent and should naturally be second. Instead, it’s second to last. The actual first chapter is a kind of wooden haranguing about the strip malls and chain stores in places like Niagara Falls, NY, and Valencia, California. (About as tired as it sounds.) The second is a chapter on Berlin is perfectly fine, but belongs more in the middle. Given that few readers actually make it past the first chapter of any book, it’s kind of like running a clothes store and dressing the window mannequins in the clothes that don’t sell.

More perspicacious readers will immediately understand that there’s no need to approach it in a linear fashion though. It’s more like one of those books you consume in random chunks–a page here on the bus, a subsection there in a waiting room. The epilogue (from which the Penalosa quote comes) contains some lovely and powerful writing about the possibilities of our urban spaces and could easily be read first, in fact.
Byrne is also a photographer and visual artist and the entire book is sprinkled through with photos. Given that people are showing less and less tolerance for big chunks of plain text in this the age the interwebs, it’s a smart writerly strategy. One even wonders if Byrne is consciously imitating the style of the brilliant German writer WG Sebald. In either case, we’re guessing Sebald, who died in 2001 in an accident with a semi truck on an English highway, would have approved of the results.

Top photo: Annie Leibovitz; Lower photo via