David Byrne on how biking builds a better a city – and growing up in Arbutus

From Baltimore Brew

Writer, musician and former MICA student and Talking Heads front-man David Byrne had a thoughtful piece on biking yesterday in The New York Times. The peg was New York’s bike-share program which is going to start with 420 stations in Manhattan, Long Island and Brooklyn and ultimately make 10,000 bikes available.

But then he goes on to discuss how bicycles help us with “learning to live with cities instead of in spite of them” and how the failure of urban transportation in Baltimore contributed to white flight and the downward spiral of the urban core. And he anchors the piece with his own recollections of growing up around here:

“I realized that bike travel had practical value a long time ago, when I was a kid, in Baltimore. I lived in Arbutus, which is on the outskirts, near the city line. There was public transportation, a bus line, but it was designed mostly to get people into the central city. It was useful for an occasional urban gawking adventure, but it was useless if I wanted to visit my friends. So I rode a bike to get to the nearby neighborhoods where they lived and where my high school was.

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Read more: http://www.baltimorebrew.com/2012/05/28/david-byrne-on-how-biking-builds-a-better-a-city-and-growing-up-in-arbutus/

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