Fishman Makes Waves in Atlanta

Last month Charles Fishman lectured a packed house at the AT&T auditorium about what we can do to ensure the safety and reliability of our water supplies. Known for his timely and incisive journalism with books such as The Walmart Effect and most recently The Big Thirst, Fishman did not disappoint.

First, some fun facts about water:

• Campbell's Soup operates a factory in Illinois that uses enough water to supply a city of 155,000 residents. Only 3% of it goes into the soup.
• Bottled water is one of the most common items sold in American grocery stores. Americans spent $10.6 billion on bottled water in 2009, something that flows out of our taps for almost nothing.
• It takes a lot of water to cool our electric power plants, and electric utility companies account for half of all the water consumed in the state of Georgia. The average household in the U.S. uses 100 gallons per day, but our indirect consumption based on the amount of electricity we use adds another 150 gallons.
• Antiquated distribution systems in the City of Atlanta and DeKalb County lose 15% of their water through leakage.

Charles Fishman is a great explainer, and this talent comes in handy for a subject as complicated as is our relationship with water.

Viewed on a global scale, water is a resource so vital that countries will sometimes fight wars over it. Fishman cautions us to think locally, where so many critical opportunities and solutions await our discovery.

But first we must overcome inaccuracies in our conventional wisdom about water that inhibit our ability to enact sensible water policies. This starts with the way we pay for it.

Fishman posits that we recently lived through a golden age of water, when we never had to think about water in its apparently limitless abundance. Most municipal water utilities have been happy to charge their customers only to defray the costs of treatment, distribution and disposal. The water itself was free.

Throughout this golden age we assumed that the water itself had no economic value. Amidst the regional "water wars" involving Georgia, Alabama and Florida we now know this to be false. Many regions of the United States are grappling with similar concerns about the adequacy of their water supplies, especially as we face the intensified effects of global climate change and extreme weather events.

So, water is priced too cheaply. Like all vital natural resources our use of water ought to bear a cost significant enough to spur its conservation.

Consider how higher gasoline prices spur the availability and popularity of fuel efficient automobiles. When was the last time you had a casual conversation with your friends about the price of water, the same friends who always know which gas stations have the lowest prices?

This applies not only to municipal water supplies. Most electric power plant operators withdraw vast amounts of water from our rivers and lakes and pay nothing for it. More in my blog, The Water-Electricity Nexus.

All of this matters out of our concern for our health, for economic development, and for the environment.

Fishman said we need to "tap" into our emotional attachment with water to develop new and innovative solutions. He calls it Smart Water and provided several examples.

Orlando, FL is one of several municipalities that has banned the use of drinking water for irrigating lawns. Time for us to re-learn the art of rainwater harvesting and graywater recycling!

Most of his examples come by way of the private sector, where business leaders are finding that conservation and water efficiency can be cost-effective business strategies. It has to go beyond the purview of the steely-eyed capitalist and into the consciousness of the public and our elected officials.

We currently spend almost as much for bottled water as we do for our public water infrastructure, which sorely needs to become more flexible in the face of weather extremes caused by climate change. The $10.6 billion or so that Americans spent annually on bottled water could go a long way to assure that our municipal water systems are safe, secure and environmentally-sound.

We clearly can afford it but so far lack the will.

Fishman's lecture could have tackled much broader issues concerning our relationship with water, such as the privatization of public water supplies and the contamination of supplies by agricultural pesticides. But he wants us to focus on the issues we can best address at a local and regional level.

The NRA Steals an Emmy

Wayne LaPierre may not have accomplished his aims during yesterday's NRA press conference, but his performance achieved something even more remarkable. While telling us that the best way to stop the senseless violence in our schools is to fill them with armed "good guys," LaPierre conjured the working-stiff ghost of Archie Bunker.
As a lifelong fan of the 1970s TV sitcom All in the Family I remember the episode when Archie, brilliantly played by Carroll O'Connor, gave an equal time appearance on his local TV news program. For those of you too young to remember there once was a time when anyone could voice their opinions on TV, at least before President Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine.
Anyway, Archie Bunker had an answer to the big public scare of the time, which was the hijacking of commercial aircraft by armed assailants. A flop-sweating Archie stared doe-eyed into the camera and explained that each passenger should be given a gun as they boarded their flight.
If everyone on the plane were armed, he reasoned, no "bad guy" would ever think of pulling out a weapon. Upon safely arriving at their destination, passengers would simply surrender their guns as they de-planed.
Case closed!
If Wayne LaPierre fails in his quest to defeat proposals for even the mildest forms of gun control, as he has done so deftly throughout his years as president of the NRA, he should at least be awarded one of Carroll O'Connor's Emmys, for proving to us that the spirit of Archie Bunker is alive and well.


- Thanks for reading, and stay in touch!

Loving the Brain Bucket

Photo courtesy of Belle Helmets

As an avid recreational cyclist and frequent bicycle commuter, I would never dream of swinging my leg over a bike without wearing a helmet.
Bike helmets work. I have a few that I've worn over the years bearing the unmistakable signs that they served their intended purpose: cracked and scraped where my skull would otherwise have borne the damage.
That said, wearing a helmet is a personal choice that should not be forced upon me or any other adult. Those who impose helmet use on all cyclists impose a double standard of safety and needlessly impede the popularity of bicycling.
We should take note of the dearth of bicycle helmets in Europe. There, the widespread use of bicycles is largely fueled by pragmatism. In many cases the bicycle is the simplest, cheapest, easiest way to complete a desired trip. That includes one's attire.
Europeans rarely bicycle in anything other than their street, school or business attire. The bicycle helmet has not part in it.
In the same way, Americans would hardly find it convenient to wear a crash helmet while driving our automobiles, although one could doubtlessly complete a thorough search of the research literature and "prove" that widespread helmet use would reduce the number of head injuries from automobile accidents.
After all, helmets are entirely acceptable to NASCAR.

Some personal choices, stupid as they might appear, should not be legislated. Light up a smoke and think about it.

NEW BOOK: The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

As a long-time fan of professional bike racing, I read Tyler Hamilton's new autobiography with some preconceived notions shared by many. Doping among riders has been part of professional cycling's long history almost from it's beginning, so why all the fuss now? It's part of the sport: always has, always will.

Second, any meaningful story about the events of the past sixteen years cannot avoid featuring cycling's star character, Lance Armstrong, who continues to face serious efforts to prosecute...or as he says, persecute. Aren't such efforts meaningless and in fact detrimental both to cycling as a sport and to Armstrong's many charitable efforts? It's water way, way under the bridge, so what would busting him now accomplish?

Thirdly, given Tyler Hamilton's long history of cheating and coverup, why should we believe anything he has to say now? To that point, Daniel Coyle proves to be an effective co-author.

Having already written an outsider's account Lance Armstrong's War with Armstrong's cooperation, Coyle possesses valuable familiarity with professional cycling without the emotional stake held by those who are also fans. He already had a rough outline of the sport's history with doping, and Tyler Hamilton provides the hard-to-obtain details from an insider.

Coyle took care in selecting which of Hamilton's anecdotes to include in the book, corroborating wherever possible the accounts of other witnesses. Each chapter is extensively footnoted, including many incisive comments by one of Hamilton's former team mates, Jonathan Vaughters.

So, yes, the book's accounts are credible.

The Secret Race explains why doping as practiced within professional cycling in recent years is a serious problem, and it has destroyed many lives both figuratively and literally. More importantly, it points to the cycling's only hope for meaningful redemption.

This is a story about the deeply in-bred culture of bad actors who control the sport: the team owners, coaches, sanctioning bodies, sponsors...and Lance Armstrong. Bring the bad actors to justice, and younger cyclists may once again believe that they can race clean and still win.

The Secret Race weaves together all the significant doping scandals of the past 15 years. Although the publicity surrounding this book is driven by the interest in Lance Armstrong, the book exposes a sport-wide culture where doping was expected and the infrastructure to support it was easily accessible to the best riders. The pressure to win and the money riding on the outcome meant that cheating was/(is?) almost inevitable in pro cycling- especially given the ineffective testing standards during Hamilton's day.

Hamilton: They've got their doctors, and we have ours. Ours were better than theirs.

Andy Hampsten, the American who rose to professional cycling's elite ranks after winning the Giro de Italia in1988, eventually found himself out-muscled by nobody competitors who suddenly transformed themselves, turbocharged by the new blood booster called EPO.

In the mid eighties, when I came up, riders were doping but it was still possible to compete with them...bottom line, a clean rider could compete in the big three-week races. EPO changed everything...all of a sudden whole teams were ragingly fast, all of a sudden I was struggling to make time limits... As the 1996 season went by...everybody knew what was up, everybody was talking about EPO, everybody could see the writing on the wall.

Many have a blasé attitude towards athletes' use of performance enhancing drugs, because "it was a level playing field; they all doped." That would be fine if all athletes have the same access to the new technologies and the same protections from being caught.

For years I believed the Lance Armstrong story, about a genetically gifted athlete who beat his cancer and then dominated the sport of professional cycling mainly by training harder and smarter than his competitors. His physiological talents and his professional work ethic cannot be denied.

But the Lance Armstrong myth, on which he created an enormously successful commercial brand, only partially explains his success with cycling. Lance also proved to be more ruthless, better-resourced, and politically cunning than his competitors. The difference is Lance had a story-book narrative that appealed to the general public and therefore sponsors and industry hacks. Protection from within the UCI sounds ridiculous - which is what Lance counted on - and most people would never believe such a thing.

Example: another powerful doping method that came in vogue among cyclists in the late 1990's involved the harvesting of a one's blood prior to a big race and then re-infusing it either before or during the race. Lance retained the services of the notorious Dr. Michele Ferrari, and paid Ferrari to work only with him.

That left most of his closest competitors seeking the services of the equally-notorious Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes.
Problem is, Dr. Fuentes sometimes suffered from organization lapses, in in numerous instances re-infused the wrong blood into his clients.

Tyler Hamilton was busted in 2004 after a doing control test detected traces of someone else's blood in his. While Hamilton now admits to accepting illegal transfusions of his own blood, he was only caught after Fuente mixed up blood supplies from various clients while the blood was being processed in his lab. Bad luck for Lance's competitors who did not have their own personal doping service!

Ironically, one possible side-effect of taking EPO is an increased risk of certain cancers, including testicular. There is strong evidence that Lance did a lot of EPO before his cancer diagnosis in 1996.

This book provides a valuable cautionary tale even for those who are not fans of professional cycling. Tyler Hamilton was in effect a made man, working within a league of organized crime.

As Daniel Coyle writes in the book's prologue:

He pointed to the crook of his elbows, to matching spidery scars that ran along his veins. "We all have scars like this," he said. "It's like a tattoo from a fraternity."

Or from a gang.

The book describes acts of collusion, intimidation and conspiracy by prominent members of professional cycling representing the athletes, team management, commercial sponsors and governing bodies. Most of all, it recounts many instances of their omertà, or code of silence.

The corruption of professional cycling grew out of an environment dominated by hypercompetetive characters, large sums of money, powerful enabling technologies and weak independent oversight.
Jonathan Vaughters said:

This is what happens when there’s no auditing. It’s a larger fabric of the way people behave in a corrupt culture...there’s a cheat-or-be-cheated mentality. You have the UCI in a position of promoting the sport and regulating it. There’s no way they’d have done a good job. And then along comes a guy like Armstrong who’s a great story and is going to drive all this interest in the sport... “Why kill the golden goose?”

We find the same conditions present in other corrupt parts of our society, inside and outside of sports.

Wall Street, anyone?

UPDATE: The US Anti Doping Agency has investigated Armstrong and plans to make public its dossier of gathered evidence before the end of the year. USADA, which has already banned Armstrong and stripped him from his victories since 1998, is acting beyond the eight-year statute of limitations normally applicable within the framework of the World Anti-Doping Code. USADA is nonetheless proceeding against Armstrong, because the law states that the eight-year statute is invalid in cases where the accused influenced the witnesses who could have testified against him, concealed proof or lied under oath. USADA will try to prove that this has happened in the Armstrong case.

See also my previous post, Our Dope(r) Culture.

Thanks as always for reading and please stay in touch!

Bicycling's Unspoken Rules of the Road

R-E-S-P-E-C-T. One can almost hear Aretha's back track while listening to that tired story about bicyclists needing to obey the traffic laws.

A recent NY Times op-ed by Randy Cohen (If Kant were a New York City Cyclist) raised a tsunami of criticism from cyclists and noncyclists alike. Cohen, who for many years edited a weekly column about ethics in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, expressed a point of view I find to be spot-on.

Critics are bristling at the thought of excusing law-breaking cyclists, under any conditions.

Apparently Cohen's biggest mistake was to cite Kant while he debunked longstanding beliefs held by many. Who reads Kant anymore?

So let's set that aside and talk about matters of safety and respect.

Over the past 22 years I have bicycled over 71,000 miles, mostly on the streets and roads of Atlanta. Despite the challenging conditions here for biking I have done so accident-free and thus feel I know something about what a cyclist can do to avoid collisions with other vehicles.

We can all agree that respect for cyclists is a good thing, both in creating safer conditions on the road and in obtaining specific legal and infrastructure accommodations from the powers-that-be.

But I disagree with the conduct some insist are vital for cyclists to gain that respect, and I furthermore think such respect may be overrated.

In places I know well such as Atlanta and New York, many road users pick and choose which laws to obey based on a their needs, preferences, the effectiveness of local law enforcement and (hopefully) common sense. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it has stood the test of time!

I vividly remember my high school drivers ed (yes, it was decades ago), when a NY State Trooper addressed my class by telling us that that the police do not issue speeding tickets if they clock a speed less than 6 miles over the limit, or on interstates if the speed is less than 65 in a posted 55.

Great, we budding drivers thought, permission to break the law!

And it's not just speed limits that we are flaunting. Texting, rolling stop signs, double parking and unsignaled turns are just some of the many infractions frequently practiced by a broad swath of motorists. I frequently see police cruisers doing it.

Meanwhile we have our anecdotes from witnessing bad bicycling behavior. Motorists love to cite this as a frequent bone of contention.

But what thinking person concludes that cyclists break the laws any more frequently than noncyclists? Where, then, does this obsession with cyclist misbehavior come from? 

But first a word about safety.

Indeed, scofflaws of all stripes can make bad decisions...dangerous decisions. But who predominantly suffers for these bad decisions? HINT: if you are encapsulated in a steel-and-glass-and-plastic can, you usually are not the one most at risk of harm.

This is where bikes and cars occupy different ethical grounds based on their potential for harm. Put another way, we need a stronger appreciation for the benefits of placing ourselves under conditions that mitigate the consequences of poor judgement.

When you see a cyclist doing something patently stupid, imperiling themselves or (more rarely) others, don't hate on cyclists. Instead think to yourself, Oh, good, at least that bonehead isn't driving a 4,000-pound Explorer.

Conversely when I see the driver of an Explorer proceed through a red light at a deserted intersection, I am heartened. Why idle unnecessarily (wasting fuel and polluting the air), because the local jurisdiction hasn't properly maintained their traffic signals?

Which brings us back to these solemn exhortations for cyclists to obey the laws, flawed as they are. Is it really so outrageous to say that many of us, cyclist or not, are scofflaws of necessity and habit?

This discussion needs more candor. Without it, we risk setting double standards of behavior for bicyclists and motorists which perpetuate the bicyclists' relegation as second-class road users.

Which brings us to the value of respect for cyclists. Motorists frequently complain about bad cycling behavior, but is this really the source of their contempt?

I am not so sure and would like evidence to the contrary.

"But these here cyclists are lawbreakers" is a convenient but not entirely honest justification for the attitudes of some motorists who have yet to overcome a stronger feeling that cyclists don't have any business using their roads. To them, cyclists irritate not for their lawlessness but simply because they are there.

Here in Atlanta we have spent over two decades tirelessly advocating for safer conditions for cyclists. Our progress--while fitful--has accelerated dramatically over the past three years. Why?

It has less to do with us gaining some added measure of "respect" from the non-cycling powers-that-be than it has from the fact that we have new friends in government (City Council, State) who are themselves bicyclists.

Our numbers continue to grow. Time and tide are in our favor and will gradually replace the older authority figures with those who get it. Perhaps patience more than respect is the bicycle advocate's best friend.

As always, thanks for reading and stay in touch!

Atlanta: Fit to be Tied

The good news is, Atlanta-area voters have spoken. Sadly their voices were tinged with fear, paranoia and pessimism.

It is a pity they rejected the transportation referendum (TIA,) because we badly needed it. The business community, politicians from both parties and grassroots community groups strongly supported it.

Supporters of the TIA understand how Georgia currently ranks 48th in per capita spending on transportation, and planners predict that Metro Atlanta will become home for an additional three million people over next 30 years.

However they were bested by an equally diverse coalition of opponents, each with their own agendas. Although the majority of the tax revenues was to be spent on transit and other non-roads projects, it did not satisfy the Georgia Sierra Club's anti-roads stance.

The Georgia NAACP opposed it, because they claim that GDOT has not been using enough minority contractors. They have demanded that Obama's Department of Justice investigate this.

Most importantly the Georgia Tea Party tapped into a vast reservoir of anti-government sentiment, especially against GDOT and MARTA. Voters could not be convinced that there are legal provisions in place to assure that the tax would expire after ten years, and that the proceeds would be spent as promised. 

These opposition organizations say that the results of this vote creates a mandate for a "Plan B," despite a clear disinterest on the part of the Georgia Legislature to reopen this subject. This would raise the possibility of reopening past debates about the state motor fuel tax, current budgeting restrictions on MARTA and regional governance of transportation in Atlanta. 

I hope that they are right but am not betting on it. It is a lot easier to whip up constituents to vote "no" than it is to recruit them into a cogent transportation reform movement.

The Georgia Tea Party, Sierra Club and NAACP can take a well-deserved victory lap. Then they need to get busy. 

They have earned themselves a mountain of work that they now own.

The De-Bikification of Beijing

Pity, the citizens of Beijing. Obsessed with the status symbols of consumer culture, they are furiously ditching their bicycles for cars. They will soon get what they asked for, and they won't like it.