Information about the travel forecasting package, Quick Response System II
I have been waiting to write this story until two of the main characters had died. It is important that people know how corporate culture can undermine public interest when there is no reason at all for doing so. The events I am going to describe caused me to leave General Motors for my job …
The Transportation and Urban Analysis department I worked in did next to nothing for GM’s bottom line. We were created because GM needed to show Congress and the rest of the country how GM was interested in preventing potentially negative impacts of its products on urban areas. All those goodwill efforts were made redundant in …
Spreitzer was visibly shaken. He had called the whole department into the conference room to tell us that management was terribly displeased with the department, and it needed a whole new mission. All projects must cease immediately, regardless of how close to completion. The cold start project was completed, though. The blue cover report was …
I bounced all over the corporation. I talked to tire people, engine people, lubricant people, air conditioning people, and so forth. If the component used energy, I had them on my list. To this day I remember some of the exact things they told me, but the sense of the message was just about the …
At first the VP for Engineering just requested to see the cold start report. Spreitzer stonewalled. There was no such report. Next the VP for Engineering told the VP for Research that he knew the report existed. Spreitzer’s story changed. There was a report, but it was in rough draft form and needed a lot …
I underwent a period of intense harassment by Spreitzer and Rothery. The obvious goal was to get me to quit, and it worked. I could do nothing right, according to my bosses, verbally or technically. All my previous research was dredged up and criticized. Sadly, some of this criticism bled over to other researchers. I …
If you are a transportation researcher, you absolutely must make yourself aware of the scandal currently embroiling the field of academic criminology. Through either deliberate deceit or incomprehensible incompetence a group of researchers (eleven different co-authors, in total) published a series of articles with dubious findings from a custom survey. All these articles had a …