PERSONAL:Zimmerman & Stanley

Bruce (‘Zim’) Zimmerman, 68, president of BZA in Harrisburg PA has been troubled with periodic weakness in the back and legs for about a year. He nearly had a back operation for what one specialist thought were disc/vertebrae problems last fall. But by a process of elimination they’ve discovered he has the dreadful ALS or Lou Gehrig’s neuro-muscular degenerative disease. There’s no treatment for it, just ways of managing it.

Both Stanley and Zim are strong, brave, positive characters determined to make the most of what life is left for them. Each is still vigorous and working. Each welcomes discussion of his predicament, but even more, wants to continue as normal a social and professional life as possible. They want to be in touch with friends and colleagues.

Zim is as busy as ever, last week having been down at Savannah GA for an IBTTA meeting, next week being off to Laredo TX for the switch-on of a new toll system at the new toll bridge over the Rio Grande. His company represents the city toll department. Stanley is splitting his time on the east coast between NYC and Alexandria VA, but is still active in Portland too.

Ralph Stanley

For good or ill Ralph Stanley played a role in spawning this newsletter. His passion and reasoning in favor of toll roads was infectious. I’d first spoken to him when he ran the Urban Mass Transit Admin in the early years of the Reagan Administration. He was a refreshingly no-nonsense, tell-it-as-it-is kind of a guy, who said that a whole lot of transit projects that his agency was funding were pork – juicy contracts for campaign contributors and money to splashed around in city constituencies with scant social justification. He’d been put in charge of a rather dubious enterprise, he said, and his job was to do his best – if not to close it down – at least reduce the number of bad projects battening off the taxpayer.

He believed that the way to deal with special interests was to analyse and publicize the projects and then explain to anyone who’d listen, what the projects would do for the public, the costs and benefits. Where a project was a pig, he’d call it a pig.

It was down US-15 in Leesburg VA though where I got to know him. Toll Road Investors Partnership had an office in an old house on the main street, I visited a couple of times. A very tall man with enormous energy but a short attention span, because he always seemed to pursue multiple trains of thought simultaneously, he was a delightful eccentric. He took his large dog to work and while talking to a visitor, or taking a phone call, he’d often watch passers-by on the sidewalk below from an open second floor window. Mostly he’d call out a greeting to someone he recognized, but once when I was there he engaged in quite a lengthy shouted conversation with someone down on the sidewalk.

“That was a county supervisor,” he said when it was finished, “These guys decide whether the road goes or doesn’t go.” The county offices were a block away and local state pols had their offices all around.

Stanley got a team together and got all the planning and studies done, and did the land acquisitions. But his greatest contribution to the Dulles Greenway was political and legal. His lobbying on behalf of the toll road cleared away the legislative obstacles to an investor built project and built local support in a politically inhospitable locale. Then known as the Dulles Toll Road Extension, the project was launched at a bad time – in the middle of a deep local recession and financial queasiness following the S&L debacles. Stanley had two closings that fell apart. In the end he had a disagreement with the toll road’s major backers, the Bryant family, around the time construction began. He was replaced by Bryant’s son, now head of TRIP II, Michael Crane.

I met Stanley again at the official opening ceremony late summer 95 where in an interminable ceremony a hundred people were recognized for their contributions to the Greenway, down it seemed to the flagman in attendance when the barriers were removed. But there was not a single mention of the first chief executive, Stanley, who had been on the job tirelessly for 5 years.

As Maggie Bryant from the podium looked for yet another person to recognize, I was sorely tempted to interject: “What about your first chief executive who got this show rolling? What about recognizing Ralph Stanley here?” But I was a well-behaved guest and kept silent, I’m sorry to report. Instead I asked Stanley after the speechmaking why it was that he was such an unperson on this occasion.

“We had an argument over Williams. I told the Bryants it was him (Williams) or me.”

Williams was a great showman for the Greenway, and a PR triumph, but liable to hyperbole, and he was no manager. The project was supposedly on budget. All the shareholders and lenders kept being told that. In fact there were change-order claims from the prime contractor Brown & Root of $9m, which later led to litigation, and contributed to the very rocky beginning of the business.

Still, Stanley was there long enough to have played a central role in creating the first investor-built toll road in the US in the automobile era. Unfortunately he was unrecognized and his career went downhill thereafter. He spent a couple of frustrating years with United Infrastructure in its head office in Chicago with Gerry Pfeffer, pioneer of 91X, trying to put together other road projects before Kiewit gave up.

The last several years he has been with Bechtel in Portland where he is president of the majority-Bechtel owned sub Cascade Station. He is proud of having successfully put together a a complex deal for a 120 acre commercial/office park at Portland airport which includes, yes, a passenger light rail! It’s a spur to the airport from the East-West rail line – they should name the Stanley Spur! But Stanley says he remains strongly pro-roads. The highway system in the Portland area is an increasing mess, he says, because of the inability to move forward with any road pricing projects. He thinks new tolled facilities are “inevitable” in Portland. He thinks the first will probably be something on the Columbia River bridges. He says these are a western “Wilson Bridge” problem, a reference to the Washington DC Beltway’s seriously congested and deteriorating bridge over the Potomac. He says he’s delighted to see the Dulles Greenway in Virginia has been turned around financially and is now successful.

Honor the Pioneers

Time to honor the pioneers! The Dulles Greenway should be remaned the Maggie Bryant Turnpike or indeed the Ralph Stanley Tollway – anyway greenway sounds too much like a golf course. While we are at this business of naming roads after their pioneers 91X will have to be renamed the Pfeffer Flyer after Kiewit’s Gerry Pfeffer who founded CPTC and brought the express lanes to fruition within months of the Gway’s opening. Quick now, or some rotten politician will get their monicker up on the signage.

Zim

Bruce (‘Zim’) Zimmerman learned radio communications in the US Air Force during the Korean War, worked in the Steelton plant of Bethlehem Steel just by the Penn pike’s HQ offices, then joined Syntonic as it was called then (TransCore now). Syntonic ran most of the Turnpike’s communications systems. He rose through the ranks to VP in charge of a region including half its customers. As electronic tolling got under way Syntonic was several places subbing to prime contractor SAIC, a west coast giant. But it had three ETC jobs that were a mess. By becoming part of SAIC, Syntonic was able to take over the ETC jobs as a prime. Zim was in charge of three ex-SAIC ‘dogs’ - Orlando, Illinois and the Tobin Bridge, Boston. In each case there was a mix of hardware and software problems that eluded SAIC people unfamiliar with tolling.

Major SAIC problems were: In Illinois the AT/Comm tags had a defect designed into their ASIC – a wake-up/sleep cycle that was simply too short for the Chicago area’s bad toll plaza backups. The tags were often back in sleep mode by the time they got to the toll plaza, so randomly, it seemed, operated as if they were defective. SAIC hadn’t been able to work out what was going on. AT/Comm said the problem was in system software –the toll management system. They didn’t want the cost of re-engineering the ASIC of their tag. On the Tobin Bridge job SAIC had installed Mitsubishi coin machines as part of a redo of the toll system. Random electrical shorts in the ACMs in damp conditions turned out to be the source of system problems. In Orlando for months there was chaos under SAIC when ET began. Zim traced the major problems to a software system that allowed toll collectors in mixed cash/ET lanes to classify vehicles on the toll terminal that also had an ET tag. Whichever classification was registered second-of-two attached to the following car, so there was a run of complaints of class mistakes.

Zim left to establish his own business in part because he had always wanted to do that, in part because of the bureaucracy of being second guessed by bosses on the other side of the continent. He was soon joined by his son Scott Zimmerman who had been finance director at Syntonic and his daughter, Jody Zimmerman Laverty, a marketing specialist. Jim Wilson, former CEO of the Penn Pike, is their civil engineer, and there are four others. BZA have been involved in toll upgrade projects recently in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and elsewhere.

Zim says electronic toll equipment and knowledge about how to operate it has improved enormously. At the beginning the roadside equipment had to be run at power levels so high “we sometimes worried what the FCC would do if they found out about it.”

He says in the early days on the Oklahoma Turnpike they had all kinds of odd things happening: “We’d be able to read a tag in a car in a parking lot but sometimes the same tag wouldn’t read right in the lane there right under the reader.”

The IAG series of tests that led to the E-ZPass system saw major improvements in transponders, Zim says. Amtech tags improved markedly in performance after a period of collaboration with Motorola that produced a new antenna design. (But their improvements came too late to win the competition with Mark IV.) The worst transponder ever produced came out of SAIC in San Diego. Tried out for Caltrans on the Coronado Bridge it only read if the vehicle carrying it came to a complete halt, right under the reader! (Caltrans just don’t seem to get a break with transponders!)

One of Zim’s last assignments at Syntonic was a six month stay in Brisbane Australia working with TSTC, later TransCore Australia, to refine their line of automatic coin machines, which have since been deployed on a number of toll roads in the US.

Zim and his family, like Ron and Nancy Reagan with Alzheimers and the general public, say they’d like friends and colleagues to learn about ALS from his ordeal. They have become strong supporters of two organizations to help ALS sufferers: www.als-phila.org, www.mdausa.org. (Zim is reachable at 717 657 6240 BZimAssoc@aol.com Ralph Stanley is at 503 226 1191, 703 548 7610 rlstanley@ben.bechtel.com)

Redman

Deborah Redman, project manager for several road pricing projects in the Los Angeles area at the Southern Calif Assoc of Govts got in a wreck on the Santa Monica Fwy (CA-60) a few weeks back. Traveling westbound toward LA from a meeting with officials in Riverside on the future of 91-East she was forced to brake suddenly by a car ahead and the rented Jeep she was driving slew around and rolled, flipping over the median Jersey barrier into the inside lane of the eastbound traffic. Her vehicle came to rest on its roof. Luckily at the moment she went over the median wall there was a decent gap in the homebound peak hour traffic in the lane next to the wall. Approaching cars were able to stop without creating a pileup. Redman was helped out after coming to rest hanging upside down by her seat belt. She has neck injuries but is back at work..

Migration East

A bunch of the old veterans of Hughes 407 team from Fullerton CA are coming east, a little way east anyway, over the Santa Ana mountains – selling up their places in Anaheim, Newport Beach etc in Orange County, and buying homes in Riverside Co, especially around Sun City off I-215. 120km to LAX vs 60km, but heck, Orange Co has got so expensive they can buy a house twice as large on more land and still reduce their mortgage. How often do you need to go to the center these days? Of course they’ll be better patrons of 91X and the Eastern Toll Road now, because the best shopping, work, old friends etc are still in Orange Co. The Sierra Club etc bemoans it as sprawl, but it’s a logical readjustment in a changing world.