Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Bicycle U-Lock Makers: The Old Skool Awaits You

I have a bicycle U-lock that is probably one of the best ever made, by Kryptonite or anyone else. It's also over 35 years old, the third version of the original Kryptonite lock.

In light of all the bad press that modern u-locks are getting, I don't understand why the U-lock makers do not resurrect this design.

The lock is constructed of flat, hardened steel stock about 1.5 inches wide and 1/8 inch thick, not the round steel stock used in later variations and still used today. That flat steel construction allows the lock to be secured in a way that probably makes it impervious to the prying tools used to devastating effect by bike thieves on most contemporary U-lock designs.

The flat steel crossbar of the 1970's Kryptonite lock inserts through a slot in the U-shaped shackle and enters a locking "bonnet" where metal fingers engage two holes in the end of the crossbar.

This puppy will not be pried apart, not without some serious hydraulic action.


It features a high-quality, vending machine-grade integrated cylinder lock (not the cost-reduced cylinder locks of Kryptonite's infamous Bic-pen-picking days) and weighs a little over two pounds.

To this day I use my 1970's-era Kryptonite U-lock regularly throughout my travels in the City of Atlanta and have experienced no thefts and no attempted thefts.

My guess is, the best way to defeat my lock is with an angle grinder.
Good luck.

By 1978 Kryptonite and its imitators adopted the use of round steel stock in their U-lock designs, to make the locks easier to coat with a protective plastic jacket and to make the lock easier to attach to a bicycle frame with the use of a mounting bracket, which incidentally, few lock owners bother to use.

But bicycle thieves have found numerous ways to pry apart these successors to the original Kryptonite U-lock design.

Kryptonite, or any of your competitors, we are waiting for you to provide a u-lock design that is known to work, and work very well.

As always, thank you for reading!

Note: I found some useful reference material for this article courtesy of Sheldon Brown.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America

Why We Drive: The Past, Present, and Future of Automobiles in America

by Andy Singer

Why do we drive? At face value the answer seems obvious. America's reliance on the automobile is a logical, inevitable result of our historic quest for personal mobility that provides us speed and convenience at the lowest cost.
Or is it?
Andy Singer is a cartoonist and self-described advocate for car-free cities and car-free living.
He has an ax to grind, and his latest book does so as an entertaining, informed, compelling read. Singer shows how our development into a sprawling, automobile-centric society was not inevitable. Instead it resulted from a combination of technological, political, even criminal developments that were hardly preordained.
Better yet the same developments are correctable, once we gain the collective will to act.
Singer's book presents itself as a scripted slide show full of archival photographs and his distinctive cartoons, each paired with with a concise narration. He provides ample footnotes for those readers wishing to delve further.
I like the way that Singer organizes Why We Drive in three parts. First he explains why we should not and cannot continue to rely so heavily on the automobile for our personal transportation needs.
The book then turns to describing how roads and highways came to shape the development of the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. Based on this foundational understanding Singer then suggests a rich set of tactics for advocates hungry for change.
As for our cherished automobile Singer itemizes the ways that urban freeways have proven to be toxic to cities. While many before Singer have chronicled how the construction of urban freeways tore apart otherwise vibrant and healthy (and often populated by people of color) neighborhoods, Singer re-frames the automobiles' place in urban environments as a waste of space.
40-60 percent of the average American city has been paved, for use by the automobile in the form of roads and parking lots. Singer explains that when commercial and residential real estate are demolished to make way for the automobile, the city loses badly-needed property tax revenue, and this lost revenue represents a hidden subsidy to motorists, especially those nonresidents who commute to the city and otherwise pay no taxes in return for the city services they use.
To those espousing the principles of a free market this is called a "free rider" problem..
Singer provides a lesson on the political science of government transportation agencies and how the development of these powerful agencies in the early twentieth century opened a new era of "big government" politics, beginning with Robert Moses' Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in New York. Singer also provides an interesting aside on how taxpayer-funded roads and highways once was the cause for many Democratic politicians but over time has become more of a Republican priority.
Gracing this book's cover is a photograph of two men mugging for the camera while one hands the other a check over a handshake...while a streetcar burns behind them. This is the sordid story of National City Lines, a conspiracy by some of America's biggest and most well-respected corporations to jumpstart the sales of automobiles and buses in our cities by removing their biggest competitor: the urban street car lines. Through fraud, conspiracy and embezzlement they bought and dismantled over 100 rail transit systems in 45 U.S. cities. While they were ultimately convicted in court, they got away with it with nothing more than slaps on the wrist.
Singer gets it right by including a fact often lost in the retelling of this story. However vulnerable the privately-owned and operated street car lines were at the time, they were made vulnerable as they struggled to compete with the roads and highways being paid for by the taxpayers. This is a case where state and local governments unfairly helped to pick the winners. While today we often bemoan the problems endemic with our publicly-run transit systems, it's instructive to know that part of what ails them is rooted in the way that governments entered the road-building business.
To contemplate the tremendous economic damage this caused, one only has to tally the costs of all the "light rail" construction projects currently underway in many U.S. cities. Late last year I was observing up close the excavation work for the new Atlanta Streetcar. Workers had unearthed rails from Atlanta's first streetcar system, buried under the pavement since the 1950's.
Ironic?
Singer takes a poignant dig at a concept widely-embraced by proponents of "green technologies": alternatively-fueled vehicles and hybrids. He states: "Those advocating for vehicles using hydrogen, ethanol, electricity and other forms of non-petroleum fuels often overlook the fact that 25-40% of all the pollution and greenhouse gas that a car will emit during its lifetime do not come from its tailpipe. Instead, they come from its manufacture and disposal."
Ouch.

I also might add that all of the Priuses, Leafs, Insights, Teslas, Volts and sundry methane/ethanol burners do nothing to relieve us of traffic congestion and its attendant problems. They say that you cannot make yourself green merely by buying the right stuff, and the same applies to those seeking their green cred based on what they drive.
So much for the trashing of automobile culture and conventional wisdom for our solutions. The last part of Singer's book contains answers, some that work on the grassroots level and some that work on a systemic level. We can show people how, by offering choices for quality transportation, everyone benefits. We can demonstrate how public subsidies work both for and against the kinds of transportation choices we want. And we have a lot we can do to correct the flaws inherent to rules which govern land use and how our taxes are spent.
Singer includes a useful directory of campaigning organizations.
This book's message is clear and hopeful. Just because we of this current generation arrived where we are on four wheels does not mean we have to go out that way. Why We Drive is a fresh addition to the pantheon of great books about transportation and society such as Asphalt Nation and the Geography of Nowhere.

Monday, April 7, 2014

Avoiding the Broken-Leg Approach to Sustainability

When any organization starts an environmental sustainability effort, all stakeholders should ask what the reason or reasons are for doing it. By cruising the web and reading about the sustainability programs of any number of businesses and governments one quickly sees how many of these organizations are challenged in answering this simple question, Why?
The most frequently-stated answer is, because we care.
Right.
And then begins their lists of “sustainability” activities: office waste recycling, energy efficient lighting upgrades, reductions in water usage for manufacturing, LEED certification of buildings, maybe some carbon offsets and solar panels. These all probably sound familiar.
Having a laundry list of “green” activities is helpful to the environment to some extent and might save money for the organization. But in the grand scheme of things this doesn't necessarily make the client organization more sustainable.
Is it simply a greenwash, for PR purposes? Is it the naïve tendency of the organization's leaders to take some benign feel-good actions to improve workforce morale? Whatever the real reason, we all could use a better answer to Why?
And also to How?
Here is an article by Dr. Kevin Lynch that concisely answers both questions better than any I have seen before. The Hidden Price of Simplifying Sustainability: Rethinking How We Think about Sustainable Systems
It starts with the use of the term, sustainability. The designer Bill McDonough has often observed how the term itself falls short if only in that it lacks a capacity to inspire people. As McDonough jokes, people are not inclined to answer the friendly question,
“How's your marriage going?”
with
“It's sustainable.”
Despite its shortcomings the term sustainability carries with it meaning that goes beyond “environmental”, beyond “green.” Absent a better term at our disposal Kevin Lynch provides a definition for sustainability so clear, so complete that I will restate it here:

Sustainability is the careful and efficient stewardship of resources by businesses, communities and citizens. It is the practice of meeting our needs in ways that are respectful of future generations and restorative of natural, cultural, and financial assets. Sustainable management is a whole systems approach to achieving superior performance in delivering desired outcomes to all stakeholders by business, government, and civil society. It is achieved by implementing the three principles of Natural Capitalism which are (1) Buy time by using resources dramatically more productively, (2) Redesign industrial processes and the delivery of products and services to do business as nature does, using such approaches as biomimicry and cradle to cradle, and (3) Manage all institutions to be restorative of natural and human capital. 
- courtesy of the website for Natural Capitalism Solutions

Lynch goes on to make the case for taking a whole-systems approach to sustainability as advocated by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline.
We all live and work within systems, some of which are physical and some products of the human imagination. Either type of system can add complexity so severe that we are compelled to reducing them into rational components which we can more easily describe and analyze.
For example while seeking medical care we may visit a general practitioner, but when we are really sick we prefer seeing the cardiologist, the oncologist, the ENT, etc. And so our sustainability programs are rationalized into water, air, materials, people, wildlife, and so on.
We certainly need to rationalize for help solving a specific problem such as a broken leg…but not in planning for sustainability.
Not without a whole-systems approach can we adequately see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. Living organisms, ecosystems, the Earth are not machines. They work and thrive not simply as a sum of discrete components or compartments. Neither should a sustainability program.
Rationalization in this way prevents us from adequately accounting for the harm caused by our enterprises, although the associated costs of this harm haven't disappeared. Someone winds up paying for unsustainable behavior as externalized costs, which is economist-speak for unclaimed costs that are eventually paid for by society or some unwitting portion of society. This is anathema to those who advocate for free-markets, as the externalized costs provide is no disincentive for bad behavior. The market then fails in serving our interests.
Also when we rationalize we respond with actions that only treat symptoms instead of root causes. We fail to identify leverage points in these complex systems where our actions return maximum benefit.
This reminds me of a case study that Charles Duhig included in his book, The Power of Habit.
In 1987 Paul O'Neil was taking over the reins as CEO of the metals industry giant Alcoa, whose profits were sagging to the dismay of investors. He soon announced his corporate turnaround strategy: reduce occupational injury rates as close to zero as possible. Industry insiders and stock analysts responded with a collective, “Huh?”
But O'Neil understood that turning around his company depended on changing the ingrained company culture and the patterns of behavior of the employees. Alcoa, like all complex human enterprises, operates by systems within systems, and every day his employees were making thousands of individual decisions that resulted in waste and lost potential.
So O'Neil launched his accident elimination initiative, involving every single worker and manager in his operations. This began a widespread culture change at Alcoa's factories. How “Keystone Habits” Transformed a Corporation
To shift worker safety habits, O'Neill created more open policies governing the way that workers and communicated. This and other measures began to produce results.
Over the following 10 years it became five times safer to work at Alcoa. On average the workers are more likely to get injured at a software company, animating cartoons for movie studios, or doing taxes as an accountant than handling molten aluminum at an Alcoa factory.
But this is where the magic starts, because O’Neil’s program was intervening at a behavioral leverage point. By changing some of their keystone habits it became easier to move his employees to improve their behaviors in other ways, especially in allowing them to take more ownership of the results they produced. That lifted profits.
O'Neill helped push Alcoa's annual earnings from 20 cents per share in 1994 to $1.41 in 1999, when he stepped down. He also helped boost sales an average of 15% per year in the same period.
“Having ideas that are related to each other is really a useful way of thinking about things,” O'Neill said. “It's hard to find people these days who think in holistic ways.”
That’s systems thinking. While this example does not relate directly to sustainability, I hope you can see how broadly this applies to activities in our personal and professional lives.
This is how your approach to planning for sustainability differs from the approach you take to solving a simple illness. Once you charter your organization's sustainability program to answer the question why?, systems thinking becomes part of the how?.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

The Cyberpunk Gets Real

William Gibson is known by many as a prolific author of a particular science fiction called "cyberpunk." He presciently coined the term "cyberspace" well before the internet age.
More recently a nonfiction volume called Distrust that Particular Flavor hit the shelves, a compendium of Gibson's speeches, essays, magazine articles and other commissioned pieces. Gibson riffs about technology, world cultures, and civilization's march into modernity with titles such as "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" (about modern Singapore) and "Modern Boys and Mobile Girls" (about the peculiar techno-philia of the Japanese).
In "Time Machine Cuba" Gibson provides his take on doomsday. He came of age during the Cold War, and his fear of global calamity was stoked by a lineage of cautionary science fiction going back to HG Wells' The Time Machine.
HG Wells feared the potential for unwise leaders to abuse technology and to destroy us. Early on he recognized the terrible potential of warfare from the air, by Zeppelins laying waste to whole cities, and later validated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. HG Wells wrote his own epitaph "I told you so. You damned fools."
Along with the rest of the world Gibson breathlessly watched events unfold during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The experience changed his attitude towards doomsday.
Regarding Wells' epitaph Gibson writes:
"I suspect that I began to distrust that particular flavor of italics when the world didn't end in October of 1962. My anxiety, and the world's, reached some absolute peak. And then declined, history moving on..."
Around the same time William Gibson was reading the Beat literature, and his worldview probably was becoming more nuanced, less earnest. He continues:
"And it may also have dawned on me, that history...is a species of speculative fiction itself, prone to changing interpretations and further discoveries."
I suppose that every age has its prevailing anxieties about doomsday. Heaven knows I frequently parcel out my personal thoughts to the spectors of climate change, fossil fuels depletion, global financial meltdown, ecological collapse.
Maybe I should follow Gibson's cue and remove the italics.
I like it when accomplished authors of fiction occasionally exit their creative trance states to lay bare their feelings. Kurt Vonnegut did it with his book Palm Sunday. I have to think it is good for them, too. At least it must feel good returning to the creative trance state.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

His Bicycle Genius Changed the World, Twice

To bicycle aficionados the Tom Ritchey brand stands for a string of innovations that span several decades, all the way to the birth of mountain biking along the Northern California coast in the 1970's. Amidst the popular hero worshiping of people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates the story of Tom Ritchey carries for me special meaning. His bicycle genius changed the world, twice
Tim Lewis writes about Tom in his excellent new book, Land of Second Chances. Book excerpt: Tom Ritchey, The dot connector
Endowed with a blend of gumption, industriousness, creativity and riding prowess Ritchey and fellow pioneers Joe Breeze and Gary Fisher developed both the first successful mountain bike business and a scene to go with it. The rest is, as they say, history.
Since those heady days Tom and his company Ritchey Logic have consistently produced well-respected bicycles and bike components, and in the process made him wealthy. For many that would be enough, but not for Ritchey.
In 2005 difficulties in his personal life would lead Tom on an exploration, visiting the country of Rwanda while it was still reeling from the devastation wrought by the genocide of 1994. Amidst severe material deprivation and social upheaval, the Rwandans impressed Ritchey with their resilience and optimism. Their president, Paul Kagame, embodied this by declaring his intention to make Rwanda the world’s first “purpose-driven nation.”
Tom determined to help them and discovered a crucial connection between two of his passions: bicycles and coffee.
Thousands of Rwandans were struggling to improve their material well-being through the cultivation of coffee. But these farmers were failing, for a lack of adequate transportation for their crops. After picking the coffee cherries from their trees, most farmers faced a long, difficult slog getting their harvest to village washing stations before the cherries spoiled.
Ritchey came up with a plan to supply them with a bicycle he specifically designed for this purpose, able to haul 300 pounds of cargo over the rough, hilly rural roads...and cost each farmer about $100.

Since then Tom Ritchey's Project Rwanda has placed 2,000 "coffee bikes" throughout Rwanda. These "two-wheeled pack mules" are helping coffee farmers and their families to be more productive, and to rise above poverty for the first time in their generation. Project Rwanda has singled out the coffee grower as an initial target, but other farmers and service providers, such as couriers, taxis, police, healthcare workers and teachers all can benefit from owning a cargo bike.
Large corporate coffee buyers such as Starbucks and Costco are now doing business in Rwanda, which is signalling to other potential trading partners that Rwanda is recovering from the recent past.
Tom has used the remaining proceeds donated to Project Rwanda in support of an effort to promote bicycle racing and specifically with the elite Team Rwanda. A movie called Rising from the Ashes tells that story.

My friend David Southerland and me hanging with Tom Ritchey
at the 2014 North American Handmade Bicycle Show
Coffee, bikes, renewal...you gotta love it!