When I read a book, I note anything that strikes me. Here are my notes from
Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne
NY: Viking, 2009
ISBN 978-0-670-02114-7
David Byrne, the musician and artist who was in Talking Heads, has become a bicycle advocate after years of riding all over the world. He takes a folding bike with him on his journeys and tours and bikes wherever he is. Byrne also keeps a blog: http://journal.davidbyrne.com/
(The numbers in parentheses are page numbers.)
(2) 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 manifestations 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.
(22) I hear the faint cacophony of many distant cell-phone rings in the train car - snippets of Mozart and hip-hop, old-school ring tones, and pop-song fragments - all emanating out of miniscule phone speakers. All tinkling away here and there. All incredibly poor reproductions of other music. These ring tones are "signs" for "real" music. This is music not meant to be actually listened to as music, but to remind you of and refer to other, real, music. These are audio road signs that proclaim "I am a Mozart person" or, more often, "I can't even be bothered to select a ring tone." A modern symphony of music that is not music but asks that you remember music.
(67) If you're not aware you're being observed, if there isn't occasional proof, then you won't live in fear, so then what's the point?
(137) The Philippines only achieved independence in 1946. They like to say their history was three hundred years spent in a nunnery and one hundred years in Hollywood, as a way of explaining the wacky cultural collisions and attitudes that abound here.
(196) Dave Grossman, author of On Killing, http://killology.com
I wrote a diary on Grossman's work as well
http://www.dailykos.com/...
(245) I was recently in Hong Kong and a friend there commented that China doesn't have a history of civic engagement. Traditionally in China one had to accommodate two aspects of humanity - the emperor and his bureaucracy, and one's own family. And even though that family might be fairly extended it doesn't include neighbors or coworkers, so a lot of the world is left out. To hell with them. As long as the emperor or his ministers aren't after me and my family is okay then all's right with the world. I had been marveling at the rate of destruction of anything having to do with social pleasures and civic interaction in Hong Kong - funky markets, parks, waterfront promenades, bike lanes (of course) - I was amazed how anything designed for the common good is quickly bulldozed, privatized, or replaced by a condo or office tower. According to my friend civic life is just not part of the culture. So in this case at least, the city is an accurate and physical reflection of how that culture views itself. The city is a 3-D manifestation of the social, and personal - and I'm suggesting that, in turn, a city, its physical being, reinforces those ethics and re-creates them in successive generations and in those who have immigrated to the city. Cities self-perpetuate the mind-set that made them.
(264) Through Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy organization, I am introduced to Jan Gehl, a visionary yet practical urban planner who has successfully transformed Copenhagen into a pedestrian- and bike-friendly city. At least one-third of Copenhagen's workforce gets to work on bikes now! He says it will approach half soon. He's not dreaming either. We here in New York might think that's natural and all well and good for the Danes, but New Yorkers are feisty and independent minded, so that can't happen here. (Why people feel that driving a car makes one independent minded is a mystery to me.) But Gehl reveals that his proposals initially met with exactly that kind of opposition over there: the locals said, "We Danes will never agree to this - Danish people won't ride bikes."
(272) Then I ask her (NYC transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn) 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.
(276) 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 largest cities. The United States uses the most, with Atlanta - which has sprawled incredibly in recent decades - heading the list.
Byrne's further thoughts on Atlanta at http://journal.davidbyrne.com/...
(283-284) Here are more of Peñalosa's thoughts, from a piece he wrote called "The Politics of Happiness":
One common measure of how clean a mountain stream is is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It's the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. if we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people...
All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We're telling people, "You are important - not because you're rich or because you have a a Ph.D., but because you are human." If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.
(296-297)
Transportation Alternatives
http://www.transalt.org
Gehl Architects (Copenhagen)
http://www.gehlarchitects.com
EMBARQ The WRI Center for Sustainable Transport
http://embarq.wri.org/...
Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
http://itdp.org
Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy
http://www.istp.murdoch.edu.au