Information about the travel forecasting package, Quick Response System II
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 …
It was 1965 and my sister told my family a joke. She said, “Recently a group of people boarded an airplane. After being seated an announcement came over the loud speaker. ‘This is a recording. You are being transported on the first ever automated airplane. There is no pilot. All flight systems are computer controlled …
Norman Marshall’s article, “Forecasting the impossible: The status quo of estimating traffic flows with static traffic assignment and the future of dynamic traffic assignment,” slams conventional modeling practices. Marshall states that MPOs routinely test alternatives that create unrealistically large flows on freeways and the consequential delays are so erroneous as to invalidate any impact analysis …
Warning: Sarcasm ahead. Goodyear has apparently just invented a wheel that would allow a regular-looking car to fly. They are helping us baby boomers realize a dream from the pages of Popular Mechanics from the 1950s. An Intel guy says, quite seriously, flying cars will be here in five years. Uber agrees. Just think, instead …
I have never felt any fear of liability from faulty travel forecasts that I have performed or were performed with my software for public agencies. It is not that the methodology is perfect, it’s that expectations are so low. The errors inherent in travel forecasting are well documented, so buyers must beware. While I try …
In 2006 Hollywood gave us the movie, Who Killed the Electric Car?, which tried to paint General Motors as misguided or evil for repossessing and destroying almost the whole fleet of EV1s that it had manufactured. As you might remember the EV1 was a short-lived experiment lasting from about the 1996 to the 1999 model …