|
|
bottlenecks -- is worse than the disease.
“Time,”
some smart guy once said, “is money.” If we
consider the opportunity costs for all the drivers
who negotiate the barrels and cones, and then do a
net present value calculation, bringing forward the
value of all the time saved in the future after the
project is completed, the average driver comes out
way behind.
Tearing
up existing roads and widening them, creating new
entrances and exits, and installing
new traffic controls are complex tasks. But so are
building automobiles, fabricating space satellites,
and renovating office buildings. Driven by
competitive pressures to reinvent themselves,
automobile, aerospace and real estate developers
have continually reinvented themselves. They have
refined such techniques as designing for
manufacturability, designing for logistics support,
designing for maintainability and reconfiguration
and, in some cases, even designing for recycling of
materials.
Why
haven’t these concepts found their way into the
road-building process? It isn’t because they
aren’t being taught in the engineering schools.
Note this excerpt from the engineering school
website at Virginia Tech: “Green Engineering is a
design philosophy which seeks to avoid and/or
resolve potential environmental issues associated
with the manufacture, use, and/or disposal of
engineered systems and their byproducts early in the
decision-making stages of design.”
Hmmm.
Anticipate problems early in the design process.
There’s a novel idea.
We
have closely observed a road-building project near
our offices just north of
Richmond
through which we must pass twice each day. This
spaghetti works involves the confluence of a major
federal highway, an interstate and a beltway, with
major back-ups occurring on the ramps and further
perturbations induced by retail and residential
concentrations nearby. Traversing this domain is
sufficiently daunting – whether to go out to lunch
becomes a major decision – that we have dubbed it
“Springfield II.” In short, it is a living
laboratory for everything that is wrong with highway
construction in the Commonwealth.
First,
one has to ask how such bad situations come to pass
in the first place. Fundamental
fluid mechanics and dynamic modeling, further
instructed by a “leisurely” drive through “
Springfield
I,” should have been sufficient to inspire a
different initial design. Second, close observation
of men and machinery busily engaged in constructing
medians, jack hammering medians, and pouring
concrete into new medians causes a dull but
persistent ache in the area of the taxpayer’s
pocketbook. Third, similarly watching big, expensive
equipment digging trenches, burying pipe, paving
over said trenches, cutting through the new paving
in order to re-dig part of the trench to connect
something to the aforementioned pipe suggests that
basic process-mapping and process-management skills
are missing.
Then,
there is traffic control by means of barrels and
cones. This is a real non-science but, then, it is
also a real non-art. Observed in situ, the goal
seems to be to create the maximum confusion among
motorists and maximum constriction in the traffic
flow for the purpose of afflicting the maximum
delay. When one of us wayfarers paused one day next
to one of orange VDOT pickups that clogged the
jobsite to express some concern about the
then-current arrangement, said wayfarer was told:
“Tough shit, Jose. That’s how we have to do
it.” Said wayfarer, not being named Jose and not
even resembling someone who could reasonably be
expected to be named Jose, was momentarily taken
aback but quickly recovered by realizing he had
unwittingly sniffed out an opportunity for
customer-service skills training.
But
why do they have to do it that way? We think
it must have something to do with protection of the
men and machinery because the barrels are often
accompanied by state trooper vehicles with flashing
blue lights at each end of the barrel rodeo. Having
served in the military and having had friends and
family who served as public servants in risky
professions, we are puzzled by what appears to be
excessive caution. Our fathers picked up plenty of
scar tissue, bad knees, bad backs, hearing losses,
etc. in the course of their duties. Protection, if
any, was sort of after the fact.
We,
of course, wish no harm to come to highway workers
but if the issue is the difficulty of attracting
workers to a dangerous occupation, we would prefer
to increase productivity and use the savings to pay
those who remain a more attractive wage. At the very
least, we would prefer to reassign state troopers to
more pressing problems, such as catching snipers. We
have not, incidentally, been able to find any data
that indicates that highway work is as dangerous an
occupation as military service, firefighting, or
policing.
If
the problem is not the skills, technology or
underlying engineering concepts, could it be the
same affliction that bedeviled Department of Defense
procurement for so many years: a bloated bureaucracy
supported by an even more bloated contractor base?
We think it might, and in some cases the bloat is
evident. Most of those we observe zooming about in
pickup truckss and climbing out to wave their arms
at those leaning on the shovels -- as well as the
leaners themselves -- show
little evidence of being engaged productive work. We
have heard it referred to as “Dunlaps Disease”
which occurs when the stomach done laps over the
belt. Not wanting to practice medicine without the
proper training or licensure, however, we merely
report the observation as perhaps indicative of
managerial problems.
Unchallenged
organizations, be they governmental or industrial,
are not forced to reinvent themselves and quickly
get out of step with reality and current thinking.
It is time that we challenged our friends at VDOT
– and, believe it or not, we have quite a few –
to do better. They can, although at first they may
not think so.
Certainly
the time is right. The budget situation screams out
for major efficiencies in this huge department. The
governor has made transportation improvements a
centerpiece of his program for the Commonwealth. By
all accounts, the new VDOT Commissioner is a tiger
with the fortitude and energy to deliver the
challenge and guide the recovery. As one employee
told us: “He knows just what he wants. He wants it
right and he wants it right now!” The Commonwealth
should build on that attitude.
Two
promising avenues would appear to be improved
engineering and design – engineering could
possibly be outsourced on a series of three to
four-year contracts -- and improved process
engineering. The governor, the secretary of
transportation, the VDOT commissioner and the
General Assembly will have to do some radical things
to convince Virginians that VDOT is not really the
Department of Perpetual Do and Re-do, the group that
can’t get it right the first time and then wastes
millions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of hours
of citizens’ time in getting it wrong a second and
third time until everyone gives up and the traffic
blight moves on to another spot.
For
Heaven’s sake, the state is doing Total Cost of
Ownership studies on $3,000 computers. Perhaps it is
time to apply this lifecycle cost analysis to
transportation projects and ensure that we include
our best guesstimate of all
the costs -- including the time we spend in delay
and frustration as we go about our daily lives.
The
current best thinking in public policy says that
public monopolies are a bad idea. The time has come
to apply that best thinking/best practice to the
transportation arena.
--
October 21, 2002
|
