Long Term Memories

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

FHWA Memory 27 and 28 Another Job- In Illinois

27: In 1979, I felt it was time to leave the HQ. A few jobs were open. One was in Illinois. I didn't apply but the office out there called me and asked me to apply for it so I did. We moved there in early Nov or so. One of the first people we met was someone who was the downstate Illinois campaign manager for John Anderson (who ran in the Republican primary). This fellow was a doctor. He was commenting one day about the need to change our energy policy. He said, "we may have to sacrifice by owning condos downtown and living there during the week and then only living in our big suburban homes on weekends." I found this very amusing but somehow didn't say anything.

28: I remember that it snowed before Thankgiving that year.
¶ 8:41 PM

FHWA Memory 26: New Job- AQ

So I took a promotion (this was in 1977 after getting married). It was in the air quality planning related area. I did a lot of technical work and developed a manual and gave a bunch of courses. In one of the courses, I pronounced the name of the city I was, Saginaw using a hard 'g' inside of the soft 'g' the natives preferred. The courses were exhausting. The obvious conclusion I came to, and it was emphasized in the course, is that, there really isn't a lot that can be done to improve or deprove air quality by merely building new roads or improving intersections or buying buses or even car pool promotion. This lesson (which we came to in 1977-78) still isn't believed and in fact, federal law is premised on the theory that it isn't true. One day, we had a boss who said he wanted to turn the division into the heel clicking elite core of planning. He probably meant something like the guards at the tomb of the unknown soldier but it sounded somewhat gestapo to me at the moment. This fellow had a master's degree in Sytems Engineering from Georgia Inst of Technology. Notwithstanding this, he seemed somewhat of a dunce to me. One day he wrote a memo warning offices of too much reliance on uncalibrated traffic models. A year later he wrote a memo praising a particular area's use of traffic models (it turned out to be an uncalibrated model).
¶ 5:35 PM

Memory 25: My boss/mentor

My supervisor at the job (this was in 1976) was someone who recently left the bridge division and went into the design office. He admitted to me that he had screwed up a few times by criticizing the decisions of higher ups. He was, however, a very amusing fellow -- an Irish-American, a proud of it, with lots of kids and delighted in making architexural critiques and the like. As of 2004, he was in the research end of highway work. As of that year, he had over 50 years of federal service. ¶ 5:30 PM

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Memory 24 - Assignment

I was assigned to the Highway Design Division in the branch that had responsibility for design of noise barriers and HOV lanes and bicycle paths and pedestrian paths and structures. Almost all my work was in noise barrier design. We had constant disagreement with the folks in Environmental Policy who were in charge of highway noise impact. Basically, we didn't think noise barriers were a particularly good feature on highways. Years later as new concrete forms (which made concrete seem like masonry) and other innovate barrier systems came about, I think the other office was more right than we were. Among the things I did were developing technical analysis techniques (I did the first technical advisory the FHWA ever published -- and we didn't publish very many of them). ¶ 8:53 PM