What You Don't Know About Sprawl by Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg USA today Feb 22,2001
page 5-9

Natural Barriers

A key finding of the sprawl index is the impact of geography and water. Mountains and other natural barriers and limited supplies of water have prevented many Western cities from sprawling; flat land and plentiful of water have allowed most Eastern cities to grow as they please. As a result, most Western metro areas have fairly low sprawl index and many Eastern cities have high scores...

Miami-Fort Lauderdale (index 69) is a big metropolitan in the region that is not high on the sprawl index. Miami shares the fate of cities in the West. Geography pins it into a 25-mile-wide area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. It ranks on the sprawl index right above San Diego (index 66), which is confined to 30 miles between ocean and mountains.

Poor Urban Planning Hinders the Pedestrian by Don Finley
San Antonio Express-News, Dec 10, 2002
page 15

San Diego,CA

The sign on Adams Avenue welcomes visitors to Normal Heights, but there's nothing much normal about it anymore. Normal Heights is the kind of traditional neighborhood that steadily has become endangered in America.

People walk here. The supermarket, the dry cleansers, restaurant and bookstores are within walking distance to houses and apartments. It has a kind of old neighborhood feel, with storefronts close to the street.

Elsewhere in California, there are few communities that are pedestrian friendly --and if you happen to be a millionaire, you might be able to afford to live there. Carmel is an example. So is Palo Alto.

But Normal Heights isn't wealthy. In fact, probably the only reason it retained its character over the years is because it had deteriorated to the point that nobody wanted to spend money paving it over...

We just think we're in the thrall of suburbia...In fact we desperately want something different. People stand in long lines to take the ferry to Nantucket, whose quaint New England village feel is the antithesis of suburban sprawl. The most popular tourist spots in large cities are the oldest parts, such as Society Hill in Philadelphia. "Why? Because walking around in the density of those places feels great," Andres Duany says. "What people want is community."
If people go on vacation to walk around - in Europe or even at Disney World - why not have that environment year-round?
When smart growth people are finished with you, you'll think twice about how much energy you use every day, the big footprint we all leave the land, and how lazy we all can be, relying on car to go everywhere.

Changing the country's physical surroundings is the key to getting Americans to be more active on a daily basis. Our landscape requires putting a posterior in the seat of a minivan to get just about anywhere...Building on the idea that even a little physical exertion every day can keep us in better shape, public health officials have joined with architects and urban planners to create or retrofit neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and transportation systems so they encourage more physical activity..."active living by design" or "physical activity oriented development."
For a building, this can be as simple as the stairs being more prominently located than the elevators, bike storage facilities, connections to commuter ( and not just recreational) bike paths and showers for people who pedal to work, and siting of the parking garage a deliberate five-minute walk from the front door. On a broader scale, town centers and residential villages are designed to encourage walking, with recreational paths, bike-ways, and generous, continuous sidewalks. The effort ties in with the New Urbanism concept of traffic calming and the idea of "shared streets" or "complete streets," where speeding cars get taken down several notches in the hierarchy and are forced to share the way with those on foot or on bikes. The Dutch woonerf street design blurs those hierarchical distinctions completely, so slow-moving cars, walkers, bicyclists, skateboarders, and baby carriages are all on equal footing.

THE SERIES OF EVENTS surrounding Floyd Landis's 2006 Tour de France was as improbable as anything in the history of sports: He showed up nine seconds late for the race's opening prologue, donned the leader's yellow jersey twelve days later, and lost his lead only to regain it in remarkable fashion just before the Tour's final stage into Paris. Winning the Tour should have been the culmination of a life's dream, but a mere three days later, Landis was accused of using banned performance-enhancing drugs. Released by his team and threatened with the removal of his Tour title, Landis went from winning the most prestigious race of his career to being unfairly labeled as a cheater, a liar, and a doper.

Positively False is at once a memoir and a powerful indictment of the unchecked governing bodies of cycling that have compromised the integrity of the sport as a whole. From leaving the Mennonite community of his youth in order to pursue his passion for cycling, to riding alongside Lance Armstrong for three years -- with whom he shared the same work ethic and competitive desire -- Floyd Landis details the highs and lows of his career with unabashed honesty. It is this same honesty with which he will clear his name once and for all, as he lays bare the inner workings of the cycling world -- a place where athletes are subject to the antiquated science, flawed interpretive protocols, and draconian legal processes of the anti-doping agencies -- and finally lays to rest the scandal that threatened to destroy everything he's worked so hard to achieve....

It’s hard to describe the impact of The Secret Race by boiling it down to seven or eight shocking anecdotes. The book delivers them—make no mistake—but its real power comes from Hamilton’s unprecedented attempt at full disclosure. And I mean full. The book is the holy grail for disillusioned cycling fans in search of answers. In a taut 268 pages, Hamilton confidently and systematically destroys any sense that there was ever any chance of cleaning up cycling in the early 2000s, revealing the sport’s powerful and elaborate doping infrastructure. He’s like a retiring magician who has decided to let the public in on the profession’s most guarded techniques.

Beginning with his first doping experiences as a member of the U.S Postal Service team in 1997, Hamilton reveals not only what he and other riders were doing and taking (EPO, steroids, testosterone, Actovegin, blood transfusions, and on and on), but also how they were taking it (in the case of EPO, intravenously—and Hamilton has the scar to prove it). He tells us how most riders evaded detection (one trick: French laws bar testers from showing up between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., so cyclists “microdosed” EPO at ten and the drug was gone by morning) and how the game was rigged in a way that made testing nearly irrelevant (“If you were careful and paid attention,” writes Hamilton, “you could dope and be 99 percent certain that you would not get caught”). Supporters still clinging to the claim that Armstrong passed more than 500 drug controls will be shocked to learn how insignificant those tests really were.

Not that all this doping and evading was a cinch. Hamilton describes the exhausting deceptions and logistics required to obtain the drugs, hide the drugs, store the blood bags, schedule the dosing—the hundreds of details necessary to maintain the high-40s hematocrit level that keeps a racer competitive on the course and safe in the control room. At times the evasive measures sound like techniques from a cheap spy novel. There are disguises, prepaid cell phones, clandestine meet-ups in random hotel rooms, and lots and lots of code names, including “red eggs” (testosterone pills), “Edgar” (EPO), and “oil” (testosterone drops). At one point, Hamilton got a text from his doctor on his prepaid phone during a Tour de France rest day: “The restaurant is 167 miles away.” Translation: Meet me in room 167 for your blood transfusion.

The drugs are everywhere, and as Hamilton explains, Armstrong was not just another cyclist caught in the middle of an established drug culture—he was a pioneer pushing into uncharted territory. In this sense, the book destroys another myth: that everyone was doing it, so Armstrong was, in a weird way, just competing on a level playing field. There was no level playing field. With his connections to Michele Ferrari, the best dishonest doctor in the business, Armstrong was always “two years ahead of what everybody else was doing,” Hamilton writes. Even on the Postal squad there was a pecking order. Armstrong got the superior treatments.

What ultimately makes the book so damning, however, is that it doesn’t require readers to put their full faith in Hamilton’s word. In the book’s preface, which details its genesis, Coyle not so subtly addresses Armstrong’s supporters by pointing out that, while the story is told through Hamilton, nine former Postal teammates agreed to cooperate with him on The Secret Race, verifying and corroborating Hamilton’s account. Nine teammates. That fact is the first punch thrown at Armstrong’s supporters—and it might be the most damaging one. Next Wednesday, when The Secret Race comes out, backers will probably make the familiar claim that Hamilton is a disgruntled, bitter ex-rival who got popped for doping and is now looking to cash in. But that doesn’t explain why nine former teammates agreed to cooperate.

"In the City of Bikes" is an insightful book. And it's an especially enjoyable one for anyone who's ever thought the world would be a better place if more people rode bikes to work — and if they rode them to the hospital to deliver their babies too.