simplicity

Simplicity has been a theme in my posts. I think about it in many contexts. Recently I was thinking about paying for parking on campus. I've opted for Virginia Tech's "Bus, Bike, and Walk" pass, since I bike to work at every opportunity. I can get 30 discounted, daily parking permits for the few days I drive. The idea is that this rewards people who try to drive less, etc. The fact that most universities (unlike other businesses) don't provide free parking for their employees could also discourage unnecessary driving. Except that the way many American universities and cities are laid out, driving is the most convenient option, in winter. So many people play it safe and go with the annual pass. But is complicating things with these multiple options really productive and worth it? I was thinking about parking enforcement. -people getting paid to drive around in golf carts, and check tags, etc. They look at annual tags, daily passes, etc., etc. There are people at the parking office who handle parking applications, and pass out the various type of tags, etc. Wouldn't it be simpler to just track license plates? An employee, student, . . . whoever, goes on to a website, enters payment and authentication information, and their license plate number. If you enter more than one license plate number, why would the university care if you want want to increase your chances of paying for someone's parking, or taking responsibility for their vehicle's presence on campus? Why have people reading, issuing, renewing, losing, different types of passes, that regularly expire (and have to be re-issued, lost,  transferred, . . . . . )? In most (all?) states, a clearly legible license tag is required to drive. Parking enforcement people could then just check license plates. Even better: They could take pictures of the plates, and optical character recognition (OCR) software (as is commonly used by Google, et. al.) could read the plates and automatically/instantaneously register the parking "event" at the parking services office. The types of characters used for license plates are standard (lower variability, compared to other text), so the OCR would be much less error-prone, and much more easily optimized, than for other applications. It is a relatively simple problem: You want to identify a vehicle as belonging to someone who has a right to be parking on campus. You want to, I would hope, charge them fairly for parking on campus. To make sure you get the amount of money you need, for whatever parking money is supposed to fund, you set daily prices based on a conservative estimate of previous annual pass cost, divided by the average number days particular types of pass-holders have their car on campus. The incentive to seek out alternate means of transportation is built in. Each day you park on campus, you pay. -but make this a little more fair, compared to the current daily parking cost of an annual pass holder. Simple.

grassroots

I never did like that word. To me, it implies "lower" (i.e. down in the dirt), ordinary, non-special people are initiating a change. This is in contrast to our "leaders" swooping in, from on high, and saving us all with their "strong", "courageous" decisions. Here's what really happens: We work, and give a large portion of our hard-earned money to the government. The government sends some of that money back to some citizens, to pay them for doing the actual work. -local road workers, construction workers, military workers, healthcare workers. The people who truly serve our country are not the politicians. They are our neighbors. It is, and has always been "grassroots". Grassroots is not a special case. This is how things always got done. We need to realize that those who claim power are largely irrelevant. They only have power because we look to them. We don't need anything more than a system or a few people to help organize efforts. Collect votes on what people want to happen, then pay some people who are willing to do that. Most of this can be done by simple computer algorithms. We don't need to protest against, or be outraged about, leaders with this or that opinion or questionable behavior. They have never been the ones who have helped us. We have.