Byrne’s half-travelogue, half-pro-cycling-manifesto is probably not, unfortunately, the magic book that will persuade car owners to leave their vehicles at home, bus drivers to give cyclists an extra foot of room, Jeremy Clarkson to take a monastic vow of silence, or any of the other things that would make life safer and more enjoyable for cyclists. It is however, both a thoughtful and engaging account of cycling in cities as diverse as Manila and Buenos Aires and offers convincing arguments for why life would be better if even more people embraced the world’s most popular form of transport.
For Byrne, bike riding is a window through which he catches ‘glimpses of the mind of [his] fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in’. This sentence in the introduction promises rich psycho-geographical pickings that the actual book, based on his blog and divided into nine chapters focusing on different cities, sometimes struggles to provide. Although Byrne has travelled widely in his role as musician, and usually packs his folding bike with him, a few too many episodes begin with him biking to a destination or a meeting with fellow musicians, and then descend into what can best be described as insights into the hip things he still gets up to many years after Talking Heads split. Thus, for example, his chapter on London is dominated far more by accounts of gallery openings and exhibitions than by reflections on using a bike in London (his main tip: use the side roads) or the increasing popularity of cycling there.
This is not however, always the case. Byrne is at his most engaging when his mind is wandering over the things he sees as he bikes, whether en route to Niagara Falls or the Stasi Museum in Berlin, through the fading industry of Detroit or a park in Sydney. Does the smoothness of the bike lanes in Berlin reflect some kind of psychological repression, he wonders, or are they just a lot better at town planning than New Yorkers? Does the forced proximity of mass bike riding in places like New York help foster creativity among residents? Or does the ubiquity of modern architecture’s pastiches of le Corbusier stifle it? This kind of question often leads him into philosophical and political musing, which thankfully is several notches up from the ‘U2 are here to save the world’ rhetoric favoured by some.
After his interesting digressions about cycling in foreign cities, he’s strangely disappointing when he comes to write about his own home city, New York. Byrne began cycling there in the 80s, when he discovered a bike was the fastest way to get between gallery openings and concerts, but cycling’s real popularity has come since the terrorist attacks, with New Yorkers seeing it as both a safer alternative to the subway and a cheap way to travel for the young commuters who live out in Brooklyn and Queens. But instead of discussing the effect that this has on the city, or what special views cycling offers of New York, he devotes much of the chapter to an account of his involvement in an awareness raising event at City Hall. This was doubtless a worthy cause, but it does feel like something that you needed to be there to appreciate.
However, just as you think the book is about to end on a flat note, he switches the focus to the future of cycling and the health of cities, arguing quite convincingly that the bike is a vehicle for social equality, one which permits the user to observe and engage in city life, to be human. It’s a stirring note to end on, a wave of optimism and release akin to the rush of freewheeling downhill after a difficult climb. And perhaps, in the end, a cycle ride is itself the metaphor one should choose for this book – some sections require more effort than others, some are flat, but, with the numerous photographs, there’s plenty to distract the eye, and the journey as a whole is both refreshing and rewarding.