Top Rated Stories with tag cycling

David Byrne says "much of Seattle" is "vibrant and full of life." He wrote it down in black-and-white in his new book, Bicycle Diaries. But there is another paragraph that summons up Seattle, too.

There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts become dead zones of yet a different kin--concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. [...]

Much of  the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely.

The book itself...