Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer David Byrne has seen the future, and it's all about pedals and spokes.
 
Byrne, who founded the Talking Heads in 1974, has spent much of his life traveling the world as a touring musician. He's also an avid bicyclist, and his latest tour is a series of speaking events to promote his new book, Bicycle Diaries, and bicycling in general.
 
Last Thursday he shared the stage at the Uptown Theater with Minneapolis mayor R. T. Rybak, author and journalist Jay Walljasper, and Steve Clark, the  bicycling and walking program manager at the St. Paul nonprofit Transit for Livable Communities.  The conversation was the Citizens League's latest Policy and a Pint forum, "Cities, Bicycling and the Future of Getting Around," cohosted by the Nice Ride bike-sharing program and 89.3 The Current.
 
Clark set the tone for the evening by suggesting that when historians look back at 2010, they're going to see this year as a turning point for the bicycle. "We have reached a point where people are seeing the bicycle as a true solution," he said. The statement might have seemed audacious in another setting, but at the Uptown it earned Clark nothing but applause.
 
In past decades, a conversation about the future of transportation was more likely to include flying saucers than bicycles. Byrne shared a sketch Frank Lloyd Wright made around 1930 of his vision for future cities. It consisted of staggered skyscrapers separated by miles of farmland, over which people commuted in saucer-shaped helicopters.
 
"As an urban experience, it's pretty poor," Byrne quipped. "He's a wonderful architect, but I'm glad that he didn't get to design cities."
 
Ultimately, America embraced General Motors' vision of the city. And so, as Byrne illustrated with a series of photographs from his travels, we got concrete "dead zones": sprawling parking lots, concrete pillars and platforms, and streets that treat bicyclists and pedestrians as an afterthought at best and an enemy at worst.
 
Today, that's changing in many places. More and more cities are realizing that bicycles and pedestrians can bring life to their streets. Byrne's next set of slides showed examples of how cities are making streets more welcoming to bicyclists, from dedicated bike lanes in his home base, New York, to the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis.
 
In fact, Minneapolis is one of the cities leading the charge. Bicycling magazine recently named it the top bicycling city in the country, an honor that was mentioned repeatedly by the panelists, each time to a burst of cheering from the audience.
 
Mayor Rybak followed Byrne to the podium, first explaining that he saw the Talking Heads' film Stop Making Sense in the very theater where the event was taking place, then sharing a story about checking out a Nice Ride bike that afternoon over lunch.
 
"Why are we talking about all this, and why is David Byrne showing us a bunch of pictures from around the world?" Rybak asked. "It's really about how we want to live."
 
When we commute by car, we can't very easily stop and roll down the window to say hello to the people around us, said Rybak. Nor can we spontaneously pull over and stop when we see something interesting and want to take a closer look.
 
Bicycling allows for that kind of spontaneity and human-level connection, the mayor noted. By putting bikes, pedestrians, and transit on a more equal footing with cars in the city, Minneapolis is remaking its culture, he said. He touted the city's plans to add 35 miles of on-street bike lanes this year, as well as to extend the Cedar Lake Trail and Hiawatha bike lane.
 
"If we begin to see ourselves as connected again, that's what we're really about," Rybak said.
 
Minneapolis' streetcar past actually gives it an advantage as it re-calibrates for bicycles, Walljasper noted. Much of the city was originally developed around streetcar nodes, and that scale actually works very well for bicycling, too.
 
"When I think about what's within walking distance from my own home, it's not all that exciting, but when I think about what's bicycling distance from home, it's like the whole world," Walljasper said. "This is a perfectly scaled city for bicycling."
 
That's not to say there isn't more work to be done. Changing attitudes will be as important as adding infrastructure, Walljasper said. The future of bicycling needs to be, in his words, "incredibly sexy and utterly normal"; we need to break down the insider codes and the clubbishness associated with the various bicycle subcultures, and let people know more about the sheer pleasure that comes from riding a bike.
 
As this happens more and more often, it's actually going to be easy to get more people out of their cars and onto bicycles, Byrne suggested.
 
"I sense I don't have to push," he said. "All we have to do is say, OK, let's make it easier for people, let's talk about what's happening in different parts of the world and what it feels like, and by itself things will kind of start to coalesce and have more momentum, and I think that's what's happening here."
 
Dan Haugen is Innovation and Jobs editor of The Line.