Olav Koch Normann
In a career foreshortened by his untimely death at age 57, Olav Koch Normann’s contributions to safe and efficient highway travel could be matched by few others in a full lifetime of effort. Endowed with a rare combination of brilliance of mind, skill of hand, and enormous physical strength and endurance, O. K. Normann set a pace that few could follow. He was a leader in many fields but became best known as the ‘father’ of the world’s knowledge in the area of highway capacity.
Normann was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 1, 1906, and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1928. Immediately entering the Bureau of Public Roads as a junior engineer in its training programme, Normann began the career that kept him in the Bureau until his death.
His inquisitive mind led him early into the field of research, and in 1935 he moved into the field of geometric design and highway capacity.
The approach he followed would probably now be called operations research or system analysis in today’s more sophisticated language. Then it was recognized simply as the only logical way to approach the problem. It accepted the movement of traffic as a dynamic system involving the vehicle, the driver, and the road. Organizing studies in each of these segments, Normann himself synthesized the separate results into principles derived from actual experiment on the road and in the traffic stream to reflect the countless possible combinations of the individual and collective actions of drivers and differing vehicle performance and roadway design elements.
This approach might not have been so successful had it not been backed by Normann’s own broad talents. As an analyst, he had an uncanny ability to detect trends and relations within masses of data that customary statistical methods did not seem to reveal. While taking full advantage of modern data processing and analysis techniques, he did not forsake simple graphical and other methods that on more than one occasion proved out after the more complex methods failed.
It was this depth of investigation that showed clearly, as research progressed, what specific facts were lacking or where data in different form would have helped. Here another of Normann’s talents, mechanical skill, came to the fore, for seldom, it seems, was there available the apparatus or equipment needed to measure particular facets of driver behaviour or vehicle performance. Not only could Normann specify what was needed — he could design and construct it, sometimes with the design only in his mind, not on paper.
The impact of Normann’s early research and writing led to his selection as Chairman of the Highway Capacity Committee of the Highway Research Board when it was first organized in 1944. His selection as chairman was unique, for at that time, as a general policy of the Bureau of Public Roads, its employees could serve as members or as secretaries of Board committees, but never as chairmen. Normann’s accomplishments were so predominant in the field, however, that there could be no sensible alternative to disregarding the policy in his case.
Years of work by the committee members, aided by heavy contributions of data obtained by the Bureau of Public Roads and many state highway departments and city traffic engineering organizations, led to the publication of the Highway Capacity Manual in 1950. Much of the willing support of this committee can be attributed not only to the desire of various agencies to cooperate in the Board’s activities, but also to the personal regard individuals in these organizations felt for Normann, the man, not just the chairman. Published with some early reservations as to the breadth of interest it would attract, more than 26,000 English language copies have been sold, and the manual has been translated into nine other languages.
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