Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  For the Town Hall event I now can move on and begin to focus on securing the more obviously entertaining parts of the proposed event. I contact the Young@Heart Chorus. They’re a choir based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and their youngest member is in his midseventies. They sing songs by Sonic Youth, the Ramones, Flaming Lips, and Talking Heads. (That’s how we made contact.) Needless to say, “Road to Nowhere” takes on added meaning when sung by this bunch. I ask them if they would sing the Queen song “Bicycle Race” at this event—and a few more songs, as I expect they’ll be well received. They’ve never performed in New York City before, which is a surprise, as they’re almost a staple on the European arts festival circuit. They agree to participate, but will require nap time and sufficient toilets for thirty people.

  I recall that I have seen various Puerto Rican and Dominican groups around town who trick out antique Schwinn bikes, often adding giant boom boxes as well. The boom boxes mean that when the group becomes mobile they bring their own salsa or merengue sound track. I approach one group, Eddie Gonzalez and the Classic Riders, and get their card—they have a business card! I invite them to show their bikes onstage and explain briefly what they do. (Their stage entrance ends up being them playing their amazing array of customized horns to a Hector Lavoe tune.)

  I’d seen a British Web site, the Warrington Cycle Campaign, that has a section called “Facility of the Month” with wonderful deadpan captions for photos of local bike lanes that lead into oncoming traffic or dead-end into phone booths. A representative of that group agrees to give a short tongue-in-cheek slide show.

  The caption on their Web site reads: “After watching an episode of Star Trek, the forward-looking traffic planners of Oxford were thinking about how transport infrastructure would work in the middle of the next century. Boldly predicting that by then bicycles would be equipped with teleportation devices they realized that they could save a lot of paint by designing intermittent cycle paths, with cyclists able to beam themselves from one stretch to the next.”

  Hal, who repairs bikes at Bicycle Habitat on Lafayette Street, also has a more unusual job there: as new locks come into the store his job is to determine how long it takes to crack each one. Some locks he can break in a second, with a snip of some wire cutters he carries in his back pocket. Others require more elaborate tools. Hal agrees to break some locks onstage.

  Rhonda Sherman from the New Yorker suggests adding some culture. In New Yorker speak this means some bike-related writing. Calvin Trillin will read a piece he’s written about riding in New York, and Buck Henry will read an excerpt from a Beckett piece about a bicycle. Rhonda arranges for Mengfan Wu to edit together a touching four-minute film montage of bikes in movies—from Butch Cassidy to Kermit the Frog to a scene from the TV series Flight of the Conchords. Theater director Greg Mosher is contacted and coordinates the evening, and he helps everything move at a good pace and takes an incredible weight off my shoulders.

  Transportation Alternatives has come up with the idea to provide valet parking for bikes at the event (!), as there is almost nowhere to lock up around Town Hall and lots of cyclists will be expected to attend.

  We’re almost ready. I’ve never done anything like this before—being an impresario rather than performing myself. I’m a little anxious. In the end, I have to modify some of my ideas for the event. It becomes obvious that a panel discussion involving numerous entities and city agencies could be a recipe for tedium and speechifying, so I give up on the idea that some consensus or compromise will be reached among all those folks in the course of one evening. It is decided that the agencies and the organizations will only present what they are actually going to do in the near future—not vague ideas but concrete plans. Naturally, this makes for shorter presentations.

  On the night of the event I arrive with a bike cam attached to my helmet—well, the footage and my voice-over were actually shot the previous day but it looks like it is live. The camera shows my POV as I negotiate the Forty-second Street traffic and make my way to the theater, all the while providing a running commentary of tips for riding in New York traffic (“watch out for town cars and people with New Jersey plates”). Because a wide-angle lens is used it makes everything look slightly scarier than it is—cars and people loom suddenly into the frame—which makes it funnier, but probably doesn’t do much to encourage ridership.

  I have come to accept that things aren’t going to change overnight, but that this event might be more about bringing a lot of disparate folks together at an opportune moment. It might serve as a kind of tacit encouragement, a visible acknowledgment that change is possible, maybe even likely, and that bike riding as a means of transport in New York City might be okay—if not now, then certainly in the very near future.

  In the end, the event, which took place in October 2007, was successful, though I think it ran a little too long. We erred on the side of caution and maybe had more “acts” than we needed, as we were worried that we might not have enough content. We had plenty. It moved along fine but once in a while even I wanted to hit the fast forward button.

  Rules of the Road

  I might be unrealistic, but I think that if bikers want to be treated better by motorists and pedestrians then they have to obey the traffic laws just as much as they expect cars to, which isn’t saying much in New York. Bikes should have to stop at red lights and stop signs. Certainly if cars are expected to, then cyclists should too. Bikes should ride with the flow of traffic, not against it. And if there is a bike lane, the cyclists should stay in it and not ride in the middle of the street or on the sidewalk. How does one modify New York cyclists’ behavior? How does one modify any public behavior? Does modification require enforcement? The laws for such moving violations are already on the books, and I wonder, if they were enforced, would that work? Ideally, though, it would be great if there were a way to make this happen without requiring more cops or harsher penalties. Positive reinforcement works best, or so I have been told.

  Likewise—now don’t laugh—cars and trucks should view the bike lanes as if they are sacrosanct. A driver would never think of riding up on a sidewalk. Most drivers, anyway. Hell, there are strollers and little old ladies up there! It would be unthinkable, except in action movies. A driver would get a serious fine or maybe even get locked up. Everyone around would wonder who that asshole was. Well, bike lanes should be treated the same way. You wouldn’t park your car or pull over for a stop on the sidewalk, would you? Well then, don’t park in the bike lanes either—that forces cyclists into traffic where poor little meat puppets don’t stand a chance.

  Same with pedestrians—who in New York famously saunter out into traffic wherever they see a little gap. They’ve got enough brains not to walk in front of a truck, but they’ll step right into the path of a cyclist, thereby initiating a game of urban chicken. The cyclists then have to slam on their brakes to avoid Mr. BlackBerry or Ms. Check-Me-Out.

  As I write this in 2009, Janette Sadik-Khan, the new transportation commissioner, and others have made some changes and are initiating a host of improvements that are nudging New York in a new direction—toward being a more livable and sustainable city. In the summer of 2008 the city instituted Summer Streets, a series of car-free days in the summer during which Park Avenue and other streets that connect Central Park to the Williamsburg Bridge were all closed to automobile traffic. A significant new bike lane seems to be added almost monthly—one amazing stretch on Broadway with outdoor seating goes from Forty-second Street to Thirty-fourth. Prince Street now has a bike lane its entire length, but Grand Street has one that has met with some local resistance.

  I ask Janette where she sees New York as far as transportation in ten years.

  If the city continues on the path that it is on now, with attention to sustainability and transportation balance, in ten years we will have a good network of rapid bus routes that reaches all five boroughs, we will have many more bicycles on the streets (perhaps more than we can imagine if Albany
fails to finance public transit!), and they will be fully integrated into the traffic system and the places that are now overpaved will have been turned into neighborhood plazas or more room for pedestrians. The city will be even safer as it continues to eliminate hot spots and redesign streets with traffic safety as the top priority. Times and Herald squares will take their places among the best and most-visited public squares in the world. There will be less motor vehicle traffic overall because we will have some form of congestion pricing or toll cordon around Manhattan—if only because it is so badly needed to help fund mass transit. Cities across America will be moving in this direction as well as they take their cues from a greater, greener New York.

  Then I ask her to extend that to one hundred years . . . according to Enrique Peñalosa, ex-mayor of Bogotá, thinking long term frees us from our habitual cynical instincts.

  Certainly there will be many forks in the road and choices the city will make over the next century, and technological leaps are hard to predict, but I think we can be sure that information technology will be fully built into the transportation system, so that the full array of one’s travel choices at any given moment from bus arrivals to parking availability will be accessible and clear from one’s home, workplace, mobile device, screen on your handlebars, chip in your head, or whatever is in use in this regard in 2109. Appropriate technology will have fully taken hold, so bicycles will be pretty standard for short trips and the zoning change that will be approved this year will mean that bike parking and accessibility will have been built directly into the city’s building stock. Cars will be more like today’s smart cars in scale but zero-emission and with collision avoidance systems built in, and the city will have addressed its problems with the movement of goods as population and overall trade grow—more of our stuff will be moved on trains and by water routes. So too, our crowded skies and airports will see some relief because the short- and perhaps medium-haul air markets will have yielded to far more convenient high-speed rail.

  But, I wonder, sensing an uphill battle in some sectors, how does one balance the interests of business, the ordinary citizen, and I guess what might be called “quality of life”?

  The answer for largely postindustrial cities like New York is that it is not that difficult, because the quality of life is an important part of the business climate. In a knowledge-based economy, people can live almost anywhere and many can pick up and settle in another part of the world with increasing ease. New York has a huge amount to offer but with population growth and development pressure (which will return before long) we still have work to do regarding open space, opportunities for recreation, easing traffic and noise in neighborhoods, transportation choices, crowding on public transit, and so on. The business community in NYC largely sees opportunity when new parks open, when we propose new pedestrian areas in Times Square and even in plans like congestion pricing.

  And ultimately what makes a city a place where one would want to live? For decades they were places that the middle class fled.

  A lot of it has to do with opportunity, choice and the intensive and incredibly varied social and cultural life of a place like New York. Cities have always had that attraction for certain types of people and, as U.S. cities have become less edgy since the 1970s, more and more people want to partake in them. Now the same people who value these things want to raise kids and grow old here and that means reinforcing or adding in the conditions for neighborhoods, open spaces, safer streets, and places to have fun (and not just in clubs and bars) to thrive. The fact that I am transportation commissioner and with my team have the opportunity to create those sorts of conditions with bike-ways, new plazas, traffic calming, and so forth is another one of the great, amazing things about New York.

  When I’m feeling optimistic I believe that the exhilaration, freedom, and convenience I experience as I ride around will be discovered by more and more people. The secret will be out and the streets of New York will be even more the place for social interaction and interplay that they are already famous for. As others have mentioned, the economic collapse of 2008 might be a godsend. A window has opened and people might be willing to rethink the balance of quality of life.

  Epilogue: The Future of Getting Around

  In a recent New Yorker article (“There and Back Again”) I read that one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes to work, each way. A growing number spends even more time—ninety minutes is not that unusual for a commute these days. Though some of these folks use public transportation—commuter trains and subways—there’s a good percentage of solo car riders in there too. It’s unsustainable. Unsustainable means that eventually the behavior will inevitably be changed or modified, either thoughtfully and voluntarily, or as a result of tragic consequences. Either way it will not go on as it is for very much longer.

  The fact is that in the twentieth century the automobile was subsidized on a massive scale. The nicely paved roads that go to the tiniest little towns and obscure regions in the United States weren’t built and maintained by GM and Ford—or even by Mobil and Esso. Those corporations benefited enormously from that system. Rail routes to small towns were allowed to wither and die and trucking became, for most goods, the cheapest and sometimes the only way to get products from place to place.

  Now I have to admit it’s nice to motor around a continent and stop wherever and whenever one pleases. The romance of being “on the road” is pretty heady, but a cross-country ramble is a sometime thing. It isn’t a daily commute, a way of living, or even the best way to get from point A to point B. In Spain the new high-speed train can get you from Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours. By road it takes at least six. If the Spanish government had poured all that money into more freeways you still wouldn’t be able to get there any faster.

  In the UK newspaper the Guardian I read that the Pentagon sent a report to the Bush administration in 2004 informing them that climate change is real and that it is more of a threat than terrorism, and will—not might—have massive global political repercussions. They predict a worldwide scramble for survival and for resources that will inevitably result in an almost constant state of war around the globe. Sounds cheery. This came from the Pentagon, not the Environmental Protection Agency!

  Riding a bike won’t stop that or many other dire predictions from happening in our lifetimes, but maybe if some cities face the climate, energy, and transportation realities now they might survive, or even prosper—although the idea of prospering seems almost morbid, given that so many unsustainable cities will inevitably flounder through droughts, floods, unemployment, and lack of power. I expect some of the cities I’ve ridden around to more or less disappear within my lifetime—they’re resource hogs and the rest of the continent and world won’t put up with it for long. I don’t ride my bike all over the place because it’s ecological or worthy. I mainly do it for the sense of freedom and exhilaration. I realize that soon I might have a lot more company than I have had in the past, and that some cities are preparing for these inevitable changes and are benefiting as a result.

  I recently attended a short talk by Peter Newman, an Australian professor and urban ecologist, who originally coined the phrase “automobile dependency.” He presented a scary graph that showed energy consumption—mainly used in getting around—in many of the world’s large cities. The United States uses the most, with Atlanta—which has sprawled incredibly in recent decades—heading the list. Australia came next, followed by Europe and, at the very bottom, Asia. I would have thought, having seen photos of the massive pollution that has accompanied the Asian economic boom, that Asia would be higher on the list for energy use, but the density of a city—and those cities are very dense—often means that its citizens use less energy in getting around, as well as less energy for heating, cooling, and waste disposal. For that reason New York is actually greener than a lot of cities that, from the look of them at least, with their extensive trees and backyards, appear to be more b
ucolic and might therefore be assumed to be greener. But a golf course is not green.

  The Chinese also ride bikes, or used to, anyway, which kept their energy use down. And they can’t afford central heating or AC. But that’s all changing now as cheap cars are being introduced there and in India—a trend that doesn’t bode well in the long run. It seems unfair to expect the Chinese and the Indians to be smarter about their carbon footprint and pollution than we in the West are, but the fact is if they approach our levels of car use and fossil-fuel consumption the whole planet will become unsustainable.

  Why do people do things that seem to be not in their own best interests? Not just the Chinese—all of us. Well, for status, for starters. From a genetic point of view a step up the status ladder is worth more than just about anything else. Think about the mantis who gets eaten immediately after depositing his sperm—genetically he’s actually done okay. The male mantis, the delivery vehicle, is expendable from this point of view—at least if he has done his job. From this perspective, if owning a car improves your image and status, and therefore your mating chances, then the sacrifice—so our built-in instincts tell us—is absolutely worth it. Not really, not ultimately, but that might be what our compasses tell us. And, if an even bigger car proffers even greater status, then sure, get an SUV, or one of those new stretch armored tank-type things.

  New York City is making some headway in dealing with traffic congestion, though it is hardly a model city in this respect. A number of European cities—Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris—are much further along. But I live here, so I am curious about how big bad New York will deal with this elephant.