(I'm back! Time to make this a habit again. Thought I had given up, eh?)
What a blast it's been. While I won't go into too much detail about everything, I will write down some thoughts on the major events that occurred during the conference, good and bad.
- Venue -
The grounds of the Holiday Inn Rushmore Plaza and the Rapid City Convention Center were great places to hold the conference. Rings of hotel rooms stacked seven floors high on top of the ground floor worked great for everyone staying there, and the hotel kindly put water dispensers out each and every day, a huge boon to myself who usually ends up dehydrated after travels like these. Equally deserving of praise would be DKS who sponsored stainless steel bottles that went into the Fridge™ pouches given out at registration.
Technical session rooms were also improved over last year, this time having a much lower capacity per floor area (as each room was just simply larger), preventing any sort of heat issues putting people to sleep. The internet unexpectedly cut out during the session I volunteed for, but that's to be expected with the World Cup being streamed in the vendor room.
- Kell Competition: Bus Bonanza -
Bus Bonanza turned out to be well worthy of being Pedestrian Access Game's spiritual successor. Hosted by Cal Poly SLO, their competition layout was much the same: use of hotel chairs, play area marked by masking tape, and arranged by splitting up students into teams to then compete in a tourney bracket.
To play, teams needed to design a bus layout given fixed space, ADA regulations, and specific sets of criteria. Seats and other, more unusual features (such as dance floors, bathrooms, and stairwells) were arranged as appropriate and points were awarded and deducted based on the design criteria given, like there needing to be a minimum of four ADA-compliant seats in the front half of the bus. As if that wasn't enough, teams needed to be able to react to a surprise fourth requirement announced midway through the round - sometimes this caused a major overhaul in the final design, and some teams ended up eliminated because of it.
Despite the frenetic nature of the competition (the final round had the least time allotted), two sets of teams had a tie, for first and third place. Overall it went well and there was less chance for injury compared to last year's.
- Ft. Hays / Mt. Rushmore Family Night -
I ended up volunteering to be one of the ticket assistants for people to board the buses, nine in total. Wind gusts kicked up to a frenzy then, much to everyone's discomfort. On the way out everything else worked fine, with the eight other buses filled to their capacity of 55 seats. The ninth bus, saved for stragglers and us management staff went with just twelve.
Once everyone was there, the dinner show at Ft. Hays Chuckwagon turned out to be highly enjoyable. A variety of country/western music styles were played, and while dinner was simplistic (beef, biscuits, baked beans, baked potatoes, spice cake squares and a beverage) sometimes simple just works. The food distribution scheme employed by the staff there was ingenious - people were seated by row, and each successive row queued up for the distribution line where a worker provided a serving of a side, and then onto the next. However the boarding back on the buses to our second destination proved a lot less efficient - some people weren't aware that they had to board the same bus as they arrived with, much less which number their bus was. (The ninth bus ended up being upgraded into a party van, much to our surprise.)
At the foot of Mt. Rushmore, conditions got even colder and gustier (I came prepared after the previous day's experience facing the cold dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts). This was also lampshaded by the ranger on the ampitheater floor for comedic effect. One thing I had heard was that Mt. Rushmore seems smaller than it's usually portrayed, but I have to disagree here. Commonly only the presidential faces are portrayed, while in person there's the rest of the mountain to see, which only serves to make the prime attraction seem smaller. A screen also showed a documentary of the history and legacy surrounding the monument, and several core ideas were presented that I believe transfer well to those of us in the transportation profession. Now if my memory was just a little better I'd have enough for hunting the exact lines down.
The ceremony ended with a tribute to members of the armed forces present there. After that, yet more of us ended up taking a detour to the souvenir shop (I had foresaw this and made my detour before the ceremony instead), fueling the confusion as there was no set time for the buses heading out to go back to the Holiday Inn. Those of us on the ninth bus heard that several people had their buses leave without them. Luckily everyone made it back... or else there would be more stories floating about.
- Technical Sessions -
Hands down, the best session I got to attend this time would be the LeadershipITE forum. I heard that the DDI session was also excellent with Mr. Smith Siromaskul presenting, and also handling comments (from a certain someone very concerned about pedestrians) exceptionally well, and that just makes me all the more upset that I couldn't see both.
I ended up being assigned to the ITS session, only to see just Ms. Pat Noyes there - the other presenter ended up being a no-show. I believe Ms. Noyes did fantastic for attempting to fill in the entire timeslot with the ePrimer. Unfortunately it was kind of higher-level information which prevented some other students from being able to understand, but can't be helped.
The Media in Transportation Workshop turned out to be an uproariously enjoyable session, featuring Mr. Scott Feldman of the Rapid City Business Journal. (The other speaker turned out to be a no-show as well.) This session is another example of the importance of understanding other professionals from vastly different disciplines - Mr. Feldman gave all in attendance a summary of what goes on in the mind of a journalist, and how going about business the right way makes both the journalist and the engineer's jobs easier. Furthermore, he and Mrs. Monica Suter switched roles, with Mrs. Suter interviewing HIM instead on transportation. I also believe he did admirably well with only the knowledge gained from prior reports.
The others I attended were unscripted talks, and I would feel much more confident about discussing them if I remembered things a lot better, unfortunately.
- Student Leadership Forum -
This timeslot was for us students who are or will be officers in our respective university chapters to discuss what worked, what didn't, and what we could do to improve both membership and interest in ITE at the student level. However, an hour was far too short of a timeframe for discussion, and was far more lackluster than the previous year's Leadership breakfast, with the Western District President Mr. Walter Okitsu presiding.
- Student Traffic Bowl -
Sacramento State had a great run this year - second place in the Western District! One major shift this year was the lack of planning questions, which allowed more responses to be put forward instead of being predominantly waiting until the timer ran out.
Also since I didn't have an opportunity to do so at the conference, Mr. Lee Cabal did an outstanding job being the MC for the Western District's student traffic bowl. During the thick of it, one category of questions had both the answer and the question visible right away. Of course they weren't valid because of that operational error. So in the meantime while the judges and the support staff tried to work that out, Mr. Cabal was on the spot... and unleashed the engineer jokes. Even if I've heard nearly all of them before (like the infamous 'which engineer built the human body' one), it takes something else to improvise in the face of technical difficulties like that.
In any case, those of us competing (for the rounds I was present for, anyway) had a theme going on - all in or nothing. (Wasn't that advertised at the World Cup, too?) In case you don't know, the traffic bowl is played just like the Jeopardy! game show, only with a traffic twist on it. Certain questions are "daily doubles" where you're allowed to wager a certain number of points, which can either help or hurt you greatly. Much to everyone's delight, in particular next year's Local Arrangements Committee from Las Vegas, all the Doubles I saw were just that - wagering all. It worked fabulously well for Sacramento State, and mostly everyone else got them as well (save for the other semifinal rounds, as other schools were kept in a holding room to prevent seeing questions prematurely). In the end, it was Brigham Young University that would barely pull the win over us, since the last round was about MUTCD signage notation, and neither of us knew it well enough.
In a twist of irony, another person on the Sacramento State team would be greeted by the very same material on returning to work right after the conference.
On a final note, consider yet another ironic statement courtesy of one of the Sacramento State professors after he traveled for a TRB conference in Washington D.C.: simply throwing a conference like this loads the system in that area and generates traffic while discussing traffic - how's that for job security?