My first job out of grad school was designing highway safety hardware at a place called Energy Absorption Systems. I developed a convertible, portable crash cushion that went into production before I changed jobs, and to date I have never actually seen one in use on the road, although I did once (finally) see several parked in a maintenance lot along the side of the road in Delaware, but never any on the road and in use.
It was designed in response to a product our competitor Traffix was making called the Scorpion. Though elegant and relatively simple in design, it was a total ripoff of another similar Energy product, and it was probably that way because one of the leads at Traffix was a former Energy designer. Anyway, that's not the point of this email. We designed this new crash cushion to be mostly reusable and very durable (rated for 65 mph impacts), and as a result it was a little heavy and expensive. Before I left the company I was excited to see it go into production, but kept hearing that I would likely never see it used in California because of its cost.
For years Caltrans would only ever use portable crash cushions rated for 45 mph impacts basically because the 45 mph devices were far less expensive and throw-away. This always irked me because, come on, let's be honest, how many people "only" drive 45 mph on California freeways? It seemed irresponsible to me to be using a product not rated for realistic highway speeds.
Anyway, money always wins and I got over it, resigning myself to not ever see my hard work in action in my home state. Over the last couple weeks, it got worse! I keep seeing the damn Scorpion out on the roads in construction zones! I'm not positive they are Caltrans devices, but some of them sure look like it. WTF?? Why did that one win out?
There was a sneaky (but altogether not suprising) tendency for some companies to "work" with the government to get regulations (contracts) written with specific requirements that in the end would limit the purchasing authority to choosing from only one product. My guess, and this is TOTALLY SPECULATION, would be that whomever is buying these now was limited by some agreement that said only the Scorpion would fill the need. Great. Oh well, at least my vacuum garbage truck is out there somewhere, maybe, cleaning up freeways.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I've worked on a lot of things that nobody ever gets to see. That's how it goes.
ReplyDeleteIt does make it a little hard to explain to people what I do though.
I wrote an iPhone app you'll never use, a website you'll never see and composed a sonata for solo violin you'll never hear. At least you have your vacuum...