Long Term Memories

Thursday, February 24, 2005

FHWA Memory 17, the trip east

In late December I began a car trip from SF to my next duty station in Atlanta, GA. I went through Death Valley, through Phoenix, El Paso, San Antonio, etc. Quite a trip. I was in Houston and visited a family where the daughter had gone to school with me at University. The father was a professor at Rice. I remember taking the mother out to a bar at the Astrodome. One of the waitresses was the prettiest woman I had ever seen. It took about 5 days to get to to Atlanta. ¶ 7:37 PM

FHWA Memory 16 - Berg's visit to SF & College Course

In the early fall of 1975, Gerry Berg visited me in SF. We did a lot of things and I still have a picture of myself taken by Berg on the top of Mount Diablo, east of town.

While in SF, I took a course in atmospheric chemistry at UC Berkeley. It was interesting to see the various reaction chains that could produce ozone. The chemistry was so complex that the factors that changed the various equilibrium constants hadn't been tied down. It seemed to me that it was almost hopeless to attempt to do this given the need to monitor (or predict) so many factors (temperature, sunlight intesity, wind, humidity, etc. ¶ 7:32 PM

Final FHWA Memory 15 in San Francisco - A complex project

I was assigned to work with someone on an environmental statement for a long freeway connector. The environmental statement was long, complex and, in many areas, very technical. I told the person I couldn't look at all of it and asked what parts he thought were most critical. He mentioned about 8 areas. That was still too many. I asked him if I could concentrate on 4 areas and he said, "yes". We worked on those fairly intensely. The fellow was quite bright and was one of the people who liked to talk about the apparent paradoxes of quantum physics. This was in 1975. We became friends. We've stayed in touch over almost 30 years and I visited him in 2002 with my wife and daughter and he took us to Muir Woods.
¶ 7:24 PM

Saturday, February 05, 2005

FHWA Memory #14 and 14a- Career Lessons

#14- the memo
One day another emergency came up. The head of the office came to my desk and said,

"Those guys downtown have sent us a letter that we can't understand; here it is, read it and come to my office and tell me what it means."

The letter was written in federal speak and warned of penalties if a recent transportation plan wasn't fixed but didn't say how it should be fixed, and in fact, seemed to suggest that there was no way to fix the plan. The letter pointed out that the area had excess air pollution and yet the plan was to provide for more people coming to the area and more transportation for them. I went into the boss's office and said,

"Well, to tell you the truth, I don't know what is really going on here. Undoubtedly there is a context but I can't figure out what it is."

The boss responded,

"Take the bus to the Federal building, talk to whoever you have to and tell me what you find out."

So I called the federal people, set up a meeting and visited. The meeting didn't go very well. The federal people pointed out a new joint FHWA-UMTA (UMTA later became the FTA) regulation which had all kinds of nice words in it but didn't say much. I pressed one of the people who said,

"Fundamentally, what we want is for Caltrans to determine the transportation needs in view of the air quality levels and plan a system to meet those needs."

I could tell he was very proud of himself. I responded,

"Could you turn around and let me pull the cord in your back so I can hear that again."

He was offended. I later offended him again by asking,

"Since you don't like the increasing population of the San Francisco area, should Caltrans just put newcomers to death or should they kill long time residents too."

The federal guy really, really, really, hated this and wrote a negative note about me to HQ.

Eventually I went back to Caltrans and the boss said,

"What did you learn and what should we do."

I responded,

"The FHWA doesn't have anything specific they want but they want something dramatic. I can suggest two options. The first is to propose a multiblock autofree zone or something similar that will get a lot of attention. The alternative is to establish some bs policies that seem to do something but don't."

The boss said,

"Well we aren't going to be allowed to do the autofree zone thing. Let's go with that bs thing you mentioned."

So I developed some language and sent it somewhere and a few weeks later we had a meeting. The same federal guy I had offended was there. After we went thru the policy he said,

"Well this goes a long way toward responding to our concerns."

#14b - Govt Car

One day the office wanted me to attend a meeting south of downtown. They told me I could use a State vehicle. This was somewhat complimentary-- they trusted me not only to go by myself but also to have State property- even though I was a Fed. Well, the vehicle was an American Motors car (remember this was 1975). It stalled on an on ramp to the freeway section of US 101. Scary. Fortunately, it was a down ramp and the motor started again.

¶ 6:48 PM

FHWA Memory # 11, 12, 13

11- My next FHWA assignment was San Francisco working with the State of California Dept of Transportation, known as Caltrans. Jerry Brown was governor. Within a few weeks, the people in the office found out they were going to get staff cuts, etc. Things got hairy. I did find a nice group of people who played hearts at lunch. They had me look at documents they were planning to submit to FHWA and I gave them advise on what FHWA might say in response. This, evidently was very appreciated. One day, I asked to be assigned to do staff work and they agreed. I was assigned to help the water quality guy. We went to investigate a work site where there had been an overflow of a sediment pond. The overflow had, I was told, killed some fish. We went to the project HQ - a trailor - I asked to see the erosion controll plans. The engineer showed me a sheet of paper that basically said nothing other than that the plans would conform to a standard. I asked if they had a copy of the standard. They did. The standard said that appropriate erosion plans conforming to national design manuals must be prepared. I asked whether they had the design manuals. They did. The design manuals had a number of graphs telling how big a sediment basin had to be constructed based on how much rain on certain kinds of soils. It appeared that the sediment basin was too shallow based on my back of the envelop calculations. I asked why they hadn't dug the basin deeper given that the cost would be basically zero - the dozer was there and it was just a matter of adjusting the blade. The fellow in charge gave me a crazy look. We came back to the office and the water quality guy sent a memo up the chain of command, essentially saying that sediment basins should allow for a big margin of error in calculating erosion. I don't know what happened to the memo..

12 - Several of the Caltrans people actually liked to discuss philosophy and physics. One of them told me about the fine structure constant (which combines a lot of the physical constants like the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the quantum constant). It was a bit surprising because these were engineers and engineers aren't supposed to be interested in such things. We had a lot of good conversations.

13 - One day, they had an emergency assignment for me. They were preparing a technical paper to support a legal finding to respond to a federal law. They asked me for help. I corrected some misinterpretations they had made and made some other suggestions. This pleased them immensely.

¶ 6:32 PM