Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  American Cities

  Berlin

  Istanbul

  Buenos Aires

  Manila

  Sydney

  London

  San Francisco

  New York

  Epilogue: The Future of Getting Around

  Appendix

  Additional New York City Bike Rack Designs by David Byrne

  Also by David Byrne

  Arboretum

  E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information)

  The New Sins

  Your Action World: Winners Are Losers with a New Attitude

  Strange Ritual

  True Stories

  VIKING

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  First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,

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  Copyright © Todo Mundo Ltd., 2009 All rights reserved

  Photographs by the author unless otherwise stated.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Byrne, David, 1952-

  Bicycle diaries / David Byrne.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-13640-9

  1. Bicycle touring. 2. Byrne, David, 1952-—Diaries.

  3. Byrne, David, 1952-—Travel. I. Title.

  GV1044.B97 2009

  796.6’4—dc22 2009009390

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  For Malu—who doesn’t ride a bike . . . yet

  Acknowledgments

  Scott Moyers, my agent at the Wylie Agency, suggested some time ago that there might be a book here, with the thread of my bike explorations of various cities as a linking device. His reference was W. G. Sebald, specifically his book The Rings of Saturn, which uses a rambling walk in the English countryside as a means of connecting a lot of thoughts, musings, and anecdotes. I can’t pretend to have come anywhere close to Sebald as a writer, but setting the bar that high gave me something to shoot for. I may also have mentioned to Scott Tropical Truth, Caetano Veloso’s account of the Tropicália years in Brazil, in which he uses his memory of that time as a springboard to discuss a host of issues and events. Both books go off on a lot of tangents, which, for them at least, works fine. I could see that it was possible to make the form work.

  Though I’d been keeping a travel and tour diary for decades, Danielle Spencer in my studio helped encourage and facilitate moving that online. Blogging it’s called. I’m still finding my way to where I fit in the blogosphere—I realized early that I didn’t want to produce either an exclusively metablog (a series of links to interesting things seen or read online) or an exclusively personal diary—I don’t think my personal life is very interesting or unique. However, I did find that the journal/blog was a great way of trying to express and articulate thoughts, feelings, and ideas—many of which occurred to me while traveling, which often meant biking around various towns. And the blog allows links, photos, videos, audio, and all sorts of things to be part of the reading experience—an experience I hope digital readers will be able to render eventually.

  Thanks to editors Paul Slovak and Walter Donohue for notes and comments—we all realized that a blog is not a book. Thanks to my girlfriend, Cindy, for comments and companionship on some of these rides. And thanks to Emma and Tom, my parents, for getting me my first bike.

  Introduction

  A bike is the world’s most used form of transportation.

  I’ve been riding a bicycle as my principal means of transportation in New York since the early 1980s. I tentatively first gave it a try, and it felt good even here in New York. I felt energized and liberated. I had an old three-speed leftover from my childhood in the Baltimore suburbs, and for New York City that’s pretty much all you need. My life at that time was more or less restricted to downtown Manhattan—the East Village and SoHo—and it soon became apparent to me that biking was an easy way to run errands in the daytime or efficiently hit a few clubs, art openings, or nightspots in the evening without searching for a cab or the nearest subway. I know, one doesn’t usually think of nightclub bing and bike riding as being soul mates, but there is so much to see and hear in New York, and I discovered that zipping from one place to another by bike was amazingly fast and efficient. So I stuck with it, despite the aura of uncoolness and the danger, as there weren’t many people riding in the city back then. Car drivers at that time weren’t expecting to share the road with cyclists, so they would cut you off or squeeze you into parked cars even more than they do now. As I got a little older I also may have felt that cycling was a convenient way of getting some exercise, but at first I wasn’t thinking of that. It just felt good to cruise down the dirty potholed streets. It was exhilarating.

  By the late ’80s I’d discovered folding bikes, and as my work and curiosity took me to various parts of the world, I usually took one along. That same sense of liberation I experienced in New York recurred as I pedaled around many of the world’s principal cities. I felt more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car or in some form of public transport: I could stop whenever I wanted to; it was often (very often) faster than a car or taxi for getting from point A to point B; and I didn’t have to follow any set route. The same exhilaration, as the air and street life whizzed by, happened again in each town. It was, for me, addictive.

  This point of view—faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person—became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years—and it still is. It’s a big window and it looks out on a mainly urban landscape. (I’m not a racer or sports cyclist.) Through this window I catch glimpses of the mind of my fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in. Cities, it occurred to me, are physical man
ifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts, not so much as individuals, but as the social animals we are. A cognitive scientist need only look at what we have made—the hives we have created—to know what we think and what we believe to be important, as well as how we structure those thoughts and beliefs. It’s all there, in plain view, right out in the open; you don’t need CAT scans and cultural anthropologists to show you what’s going on inside the human mind; its inner workings are manifested in three dimensions, all around us. Our values and hopes are sometimes awfully embarrassingly easy to read. They’re right there—in the storefronts, museums, temples, shops, and office buildings and in how these structures interrelate, or sometimes don’t. They say, in their unique visual language, “This is what we think matters, this is how we live and how we play.” Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind. It really is a trip inside the collective psyche of a compacted group of people. A Fantastic Voyage, but without the cheesy special effects. One can sense the collective brain—happy, cruel, deceitful, and generous—at work and at play. Endless variations on familiar themes repeat and recur: triumphant or melancholic, hopeful or resigned, the permutations keep unfolding and multiplying.

  Yes, in most of these cities I was usually just passing through. And one might say that what I could see would therefore by definition be shallow, limited, and particular. That’s true, and many of the things I’ve written about cities might be viewed as a kind of self-examination, with the city functioning as a mirror. But I also believe that a visitor staying briefly can read the details, the specifics made visible, and then the larger picture and the city’s hidden agendas emerge almost by themselves. Economics is revealed in shop fronts and history in door frames. Oddly, as the microscope moves in for a closer look, the perspective widens at the same time.

  Each chapter in this book focuses on a particular city, though there are many more I could have included. Not surprisingly, different cites have their own unique faces and ways of expressing what they feel is important. Sometimes one’s questions and trains of thought almost seem predetermined by each urban landscape. So, for example, some chapters ended up focusing more on history in the urban landscape while others look at music or art—each depending on the particular city.

  Naturally, some cities are more accommodating to a cyclist than others. Not just geographically or because of the climate, though that makes a difference, but because of the kinds of behavior that are encouraged and the way some cities are organized, or not organized. Surprisingly, the least accommodating are sometimes the most interesting. Rome, for example, is amazing on a bike. The car traffic in central Italian cities is notoriously snarled, so one can make good time on a bike, and, if the famous hills in that town are avoided, one can glide from one amazing vista to the next. It’s not a bike-friendly city by any means—the every-man-for-himself vibe hasn’t encouraged the creation of secure bike lanes in these big towns—but if one accepts that reality, at least temporarily, and is careful, the experience is something to be recommended.

  These diaries go back at least a dozen years. Many were written during work-related visits to various towns—for a performance or an exhibit, in my case. Lots of folks have jobs that take them all over the world. I found that biking around for just a few hours a day—or even just to and from work—helps keep me sane. People can lose their bearings when they travel, unmoored from their familiar physical surroundings, and that somehow loosens some psychic connections as well. Sometimes that’s a good thing—it can open the mind, offer new insights—but frequently it’s also traumatic in a not-so-good way. Some people retreat into themselves or their hotel rooms if a place is unfamiliar, or lash out in an attempt to gain some control. I myself find that the physical sensation of self-powered transport coupled with the feeling of self-control endemic to this two-wheeled situation is nicely empowering and reassuring, even if temporary, and it is enough to center me for the rest of the day.

  It sounds like some form of meditation, and in a way it is. Performing a familiar task, like driving a car or riding a bicycle, puts one into a zone that is not too deep or involving. The activity is repetitive, mechanical, and it distracts and occupies the conscious mind, or at least part of it, in a way that is just engaging enough but not too much—it doesn’t cause you to be caught off guard. It facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much of the unconscious to bubble up. As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those bubbles, it’s a reliable place to find that connection. In the same way that perplexing problems sometimes get resolved in one’s sleep, when the conscious mind is distracted the unconscious works things out.

  During the time these diaries were written I have seen some cities, like New York, become more bike-friendly in radical new ways, while in others the changes have been slow and incremental—they have yet to reach a tipping point as far as accepting cycling as a practical and valid means of transportation. Some cities have managed to find a way to make themselves more livable, and have even reaped some financial rewards as a result, while others have sunk deeper into the pits they started digging for themselves decades ago. I discuss these developments, urban planning, and policy in the New York City chapter, as well as describe my limited involvement in local politics (and entertainment) as it pertains to making my city more bike-friendly, and, I think, a more human place to live.

  American Cities

  Most U.S. cities are not very bike-friendly. They’re not very pedestrian-friendly either. They’re car-friendly—or at least they try very hard to be. In most of these cities one could say that the machines have won. Lives, city planning, budgets, and time are all focused around the automobile. It’s long-term unsustainable and short-term lousy living. How did it get this way? Maybe we can blame Le Corbusier for his “visionary” Radiant City proposals in the early part of the last century:

  His utopian proposals—cities (just towers really) enmeshed in a net of multilane roads—were perfectly in synch with what the car and oil companies wanted. Given that four of the five biggest corporations in the world still are oil and gas companies, it’s not surprising how those weird and car-friendly visions have lingered. In the postwar period General Motors was the largest company in the whole world. Its president, Charlie Wilson said, “What’s good for GM is good for the country.” Does anyone still believe that GM ever had the country’s best interests at heart?

  Maybe we can also blame Robert Moses, who was so successful at slicing up New York City with elevated expressways and concrete canyons. His force of will and proselytizing had wide-ranging effects. Other cities copied his example. Or maybe we can blame Hitler, who built the autobahns in order to allow German troops and supplies fast, efficient, and reliable access to all points along the fronts during World War II.

  I try to explore some of these towns—Dallas, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta—by bike, and it’s frustrating. The various parts of town are often “connected”—if one can call it that—mainly by freeways, massive awe-inspiring concrete ribbons that usually kill the neighborhoods they pass through, and often the ones they are supposed to connect as well. The areas bordering expressways inevitably become dead zones. There may be, near the edges of town, an exit ramp leading to a KFC or a Red Lobster, but that’s not a neighborhood. What remains of these severed communities is eventually replaced by shopping malls and big-box stores isolated in vast deserts of parking. These are strung along the highways that have killed the towns that the highways were meant to connect. The roads, housing developments with no focus, and shopping centers eventually sprawl as far as the eye can see as the highways inch farther and farther out. Monotonous, tedious, exhausting . . . and soon to be gone, I suspect.

  I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore. One of the houses we lived in there had a housing development to the right and some older houses behind it—with woods and a working farm in front. We lived
right where suburban development had (temporarily) stopped—at the point where it met the farmland. Like a lot of people, I grew to disdain the suburbs, their artificialness and sterility. But I could never shake them entirely. There was some kind of weird fascination and attraction that I (and I think many others) can’t quite get out of my system.

  I must have gotten hooked on cycling early on: in high school I used to pedal over to my girlfriend’s house in the evenings, which was at least four miles away, so I could hang out and smooch after I’d finished my homework. We almost did it right by the adjoining city dump once—no intruders there.

  My generation makes fun of the suburbs and the shopping malls, the TV commercials and the sitcoms that we grew up with—but they’re part of us too. So our ironic view is leavened with something like love. Though we couldn’t wait to get out of these places they are something like comfort food for us. Having come from those completely uncool places we are not and can never be the urban sophisticates we read about, and neither are we rural specimens—stoic, self-sufficient, and relaxed—at ease and comfortable in the wild. These suburbs, where so many of us spent our formative years, still push emotional buttons for us; they’re both attractive and deeply disturbing.

  In Baltimore when I was in high school I used to go downtown by bus and wander around the shopping districts. It was exciting. Malls didn’t exist yet! There were lots of people, hustle and bustle. Riding an escalator at Hutzler’s or Hecht’s (downtown department stores) was a thrill! Bad girls went there to shoplift cool clothes. But white flight was already in progress and soon, amazingly quickly, the center of Baltimore was abandoned except to those who couldn’t afford to leave it. Many streets soon featured boarded-up row houses. And in the late 1960s there were race riots in the aftermath of which more whites left and the corner bars adopted what was called riot architecture. They don’t teach this kind of architecture at Yale. It consists of filling in the windows of your establishment with painted cinder blocks and leaving a couple of glass bricks in the center. On the other side of the tracks from the downtown shopping zone whole blocks were simply razed. Like the legendary South Bronx it looked like a war zone—and in a way it is. An undeclared civil war in which the car is winning. The losers are our cities and in most cases African Americans and Latinos.