Point of View


Wills and Kate,Writing on a Catamaran, the PPA and Carpools in LA


By John Van Horn


I have always been a proponent of women, for more than the obvious reasons.Nowthat the British Commonwealth


has “adjusted” royalmale primogeniture to remove themale,my take is that the so-called glass ceiling will come crashing down, if it hasn’t already. Yes, that’s right, ifWills and Kate have a girl first, shewill be


queen.All this nonsense about the first-bornmale child is thrown over the cliff. The decision, supported by Queen Elizabeth II,was announced by UK PrimeMinister David Cameron at a Common- wealth conference in late October in Perth,Australia. Coming on the heels of IBM’s announcement that a woman,


Virginia Rometty, would lead the computer giant beginning in January, this decision pretty much puts a nail in the “women as second-class citizens” rant, unless you happen to live in theMid- dle East (Israel excepted). OK, I understand that Rometty will be one of only 15 distaff


CEOs in the Fortune 100, but things are moving. Hell, the park- ing industry, long amale-dominated bastion, nowhas profession- al women running the NPAand the Canadian Parking Associa- tion, and has had a number of females as chairwomen of the IPI, including Chair-elect Liliana Rambo and Immediate Past Chair Cindy Campbell. There are even “women in parking” groups springing up tomentorwomen in our industry. Nothing but good can come from this. Successful organiza-


tions realize that women are a tremendous resource and pass over themat their peril. Congrats to the Commonwealth, to IBM, and towomen everywhere.


*** I was scurrying around pestering my sources for this


month’s “Cutting-Edge Technology” issue of PT.One of themain articleswaswritten by Skidata’sHarald R. Raetzsch, an expert on “cloud computing.” I dropped him a note, and a day later got an email back that


hewas on a catamaran bouncing around somewhere in the Pacif- ic. He said that if the “wind and waves” behaved, he would attempt to get me an article in a few days. He didn’t mention the clouds – I assume hewas in control of that. Aday later, I received 15 fully annotated pages of perfect text


with a note complaining about how hard it was to upload at 24 KB/sec. “It took ages,” Raetzsch said. Now this is impressive. I spend weeks harassing some authors just to get them off the dime, and this chap interrupts his vacation on a small boat in the middle of the ocean to get it done. Maybe I should insist that some ofmy authors spend time in


obscure places — how about a week in Tibet, Machu Picchu, a boat on the Ganges, ormaybe hanging fromropes on theMatter- horn. I understand that K2 is great this time of year. They could ride a bicycle across Manchuria, or maybe post from their iPad fromatop a camel in Egypt.Whatever floats their boat.


***


I guess my unmitigated harassment of the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA) has gotten some legs in the City of


6


Brotherly Love. They are retraining their officers so they will become nicer and more helpful. To wit, also fromCBSPhilly.com: “The PPAis spending $24,000 on sensitivity training for all


its employees on differences in religion, race, ethnicity, sexual ori- entation and gender identity. [PPADirector Vince] Fenerty says it comes after an incident this summer in which a parking enforce- ment officerwas fired after being accused of gay-bashing.” I don’t knowa lot about hiring enforcement staff, butwould-


n’t you attempt to weed out the ones who cared about the differ- ences in religion, race or gender identity? Aren’t there typically ongoing training programs – I’mtold the only good training pro- gram is one that keeps going and going and going – in organiza- tionswhere public contact in stressful situations is endemic? Aren’t these programs aminimalmanagement tool that goes


on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year? I get the feeling from the report that this is a new idea in Philly. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure the problem exists every- where (after all, in LA, some of the enforcement staffwere posing in porn movies). Doesn’t PPAmanagement understand that this is something that’s done? My congratulations to the PPA and its management. They


are taking positive steps. That’s a good thing, and they are to be congratulated.


*** The keynote speaker at the UCLAZinman CenterAutomat-


ed Parking Structures Symposium in mid-October was Consult- ant Richard Katz, Chairman of theMetrolink Board of Directors and BoardMember of theMetropolitan TransportationAuthority (MTA) in LosAngeles. Katz gave an informal speech about rapid-transit projects


and freeway expansions in the city. My guess is that the proj- ects he listed had a price tag in the tens of billions of dollars. Fair enough. The problem is, just what good are they doing? Katz spoke,


for instance, of the Metrolink train that basically runs along the congested I-5 freeway from Orange County to LA. About 22,000 people a day ride the train, but the freeway is still congested. Then hemade an interesting observation: It seems that during the 1984 LA Olympics, which locals


feared would be the first “Carmaggedon” and choke the free- ways, traffic was, during the fete, much like Sunday at 10 a.m. Light and airy. Katz asked the audience to guess what the per- centage reduction in cars was during that period. Most thought 50%. Nope, he said, itwas only 5%. OK, assume theMTAgets its numbers off by a factor of 2, so


itwas 10%less. Thatmeans ifwe take 10%of the cars off the free- way, traffic congestion goes away. Of course, we have a lot more cars now, but we have a lot more freeways than we did nearly three decades ago. Here’s my suggestion – instead of spending billions widen- ing the existing freeways, installing light-rail (which few ride), Continued on Page 8


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