Consider this a plug . . .

As you may remember, I received a wonderful holiday gift of David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries.  I finally finished the book yesterday.  Such is the life of a young child's parent, I suppose.

The bulk of the book is a compilation of Byrne's diary-style musings, founded on his adventures in cities around the globe.  As an internationally recognized musician and artist, Byrne has traveled extensively across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.  When he travels, he packs a folding bicycle (such as this one) that he uses as a primary source of getting around his destination cities.  With this mode of transportation as a unifying theme, Byrne's writings delve into a diverse variety of subjects - art, music, politics, sociology, psychology, urban planning.  I described the book to one friend as both "geographically and substantively all over the place."  

While I very much enjoyed the diary aspects of the book and found Byrne's perspectives on his multifarious topics quite interesting, the epilogue continues to resonate in my mind.  In ten pages or so, Byrne managed to capture the essence of modern urban planning theory, a subject that I once spent an entire semester trying to grasp through the writings of the field's well-known theorists, activists, and policymakers.  But even more enlightening was how he found that essence.  Byrne admits that he sort of fell into his perspective and ideology about urban planning; he did not come to it through academic or philosophical study.  Rather, he developed it by living his daily life in urban America.  (New York City, to be exact.)  He's found that the aspects of urban planning that modern thought espouses - mixed use, reasonable densities, and choice in transportation - really do make life engaging and make it interesting to get out of bed everyday and see what's going on outside our doors.  Its a philosophy of incorporation rather than isolation.  It's about puttin' the "social" back in "society," y'all.  

So, in sum, I highly recommend Bicycle Diaries.  Pick it up, or at least go to the bookstore, sit down with a cup of coffee, and read the epilogue.  It will be time well spent.

Thanks to some thoughtful and astute gift-givers . . .

. . . for a topically relevant Christmas present - Bicycle Diaries!  I'm only a few pages in, but I can already tell that Byrne has a unique perspective on urban sociology and city planning, all generated through his bike commuting in cities across the globe.

See previous posts "Cities for Cycling" and its follow-up.

Cities for Cycling

"Why, indeed, would people endure stifling traffic just to hop on another form of transportation that goes nowhere? How is this not similar to walking around outside without a coat while complaining of the chill? What are people thinking? Children can’t get to school on their own, while childhood obesity skyrockets. Yet the evident solution to bicyclists, as simple as putting on the sweater, is simply to ride to school. Yet few do."

"Why can’t people cycle in the numbers common in many European cities? Blumenauer and Byrne know why: bicycle infrastructure. We don’t have enough of it, at least outside Blumenauer’s hometown of Portland, Oregon. Its residents drive 30% less than in Houston, the Congressman said. They spend $2,500 less per year on transportation than the national average, and keep that money in the local economy instead of sending it overseas in oil payments. According to Blumenauer, Portland’s bicycle share has increased 400% for less than the cost of one mile of freeway."

These selections are from a piece by David Alpert, "Cities and Cycling: Ignoring a Simple Alternative," that appeared on Next American City's website.  Updating the United State's transportation profile has been a focus of the Obama administration.  Or at least it had been before . . . well, you know.  But for all the focus on rail, bus rapid transit, and other forms of mass movement, I think two alternatives do not get their fair share of recognition - walking and bicycling.  As Alpert points out and I certainly recognize, walking and biking do require some investment in infrastructure to make them viable, comfortable, and convenient transportation options.  But as his Portland statistics make clear, they are certainly less expensive than mass transit options (including roads), and in these economic times, that factor should certainly not be ignored.

Alpert's thoughts also address a larger problem that is not easy to address.  Many of the large cities in the United States that developed later in time - i.e., large cities beyond the east coast - are designed to accomodate auto-driven life.  This is not a characteristic of many of the European cities held up as bicycling models simply because, due to their age, these cities are planned and laid out for pedestrians and other non-motorized movement.  So while investment in bicycle infrastructure or pedestrian-friendly design could provide options to some cities, the reality is that some American cities just are not suited to bike and foot commuting.  Even in those cities, though, I do believe we will continue to see more compact, self-sufficient neighborhoods and developments that give residents the choice to be car-free at times.

A few noteworthy links to round out the discussion:

- Congressional Bike Caucus: see if your local House and Senate representatives are members.

- "Cities for Cycling is a project of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to catalog, promote and implement the world's best bicycle transportation practices in  American municipalities."

- Bonus link: If you like adventure stories, this one is for you.  Hear the trials, tribulations, successes and failures of one determined bus-bike commuter in the U.S.  (The bike story picks up about half way through the podcast.)