Share your stories....

Eric, Wendy and Joanne have been receiving many touching stories and memories via e-mail and phone--and have enjoyed everyone of them, many making us both laugh and cry.

We thought that everyone who knew Bill might also enjoy reading the anecdotes, tales and special reflections that we've been receiving.

So please tell your stories.  We'll print some of them out for the wake.

If you have a longer story or idea for a separate "blog posting" thread, feel free to send it to watersfamily2010@gmail.com

From David Gillen

A tribute to a Colleague and Dear friend who gave much to me, to the profession and to colleagues worldwide.

From David Gillen to Bill Waters, his family and friends.

Below is a major extract from a letter which I wrote back in 1997 in support of Bill’s promotion to Full Professor at UBC. I re-read it a few days after Bill passed on and I think it reflects what a significant contribution Bill made to the profession.

“I have known Professor Waters for over 20 years and have been familiar with his work for about the same time. We have been on conference programs together, have been colleagues when I was a visiting Professor at UBC in 1986 and have interacted professionally as joint editors of special issue journals. I have followed Bill’s career and have used a number of his articles in my courses dealing with Transportation Economics, Transportation Planning & Project Evaluation and Applied Microeconomics.

Before assessing his research contributions let me comment on his teaching and service/professional contributions. I have read Bill’s summary description of his teaching activities. A number of articles and papers Bill produced were designed as pedagogic devices to help students with a large and complex literature. These papers found their way beyond UBC and are used at a number of institutions in Canada and the US. These are rich in content and certainly are a tribute to his commitment to transfer knowledge. He has also been a tireless and unselfish contributor to the profession of transportation economics. He was the one who rescued the Logistics & Transportation Review and has singlehandedly taken on the task of transforming it into a good second tier journal.

Bill has been highly active in the Transportation Research Forum and other Canadian and International transportation organizations both as a member and as part of the executive. He has been active in bridging the gap between academe and business. This has been very important in building the reputation of UBC graduates among various transportation firms but also in placing graduates of the transportation division at UBC.

Over the last three decades Bill has produced a large number of articles, papers, reports and conference papers. He has not produced any one or two outstanding articles that made him prominent among his peers. His international reputation is built on an accumulation of effort in several areas but for the most part in three; benefit-cost analysis including his work on the value of time, costing and more recently in productivity and financial analysis.

Early in his career Bill focused on refereed articles producing approximately 16 up to 1980. These were to his credit and except for two American Economic Review articles were in second or third tier journals. In the 1980’s his emphasis was more on reports and books. His refereed article output fell to around 11 but still remained in second tier journals. His efforts since the 1990’s have concentrated upon quality articles in good journals. At the same time he has generated an increasing number of conference papers and reports. Except in the articles category his output since 1990 exceeds his output since he was hired in the late 1960’s. This is strong testimony to his commitment to academic quality and to UBC.

In the letter accompanying this request for review of Bill’s work there was a listing of criteria as to what constitutes ‘valued research contributions’. Bill’s work over the years but particularly since 1990 would fit into every category except (a). As I stated earlier I believe Bill is most well known in three areas. In benefit cost analysis he has made a significant contribution to the practice and application of benefit-Cost methods. His two American Economic Review articles I would place in this area of influence since they had an impact on how people viewed transportation in international trade and hence how they assessed changes in trading regimes. His work on valuation of time for passengers as well as freight has been another area of influence. The World Conference paper and Journal of Transportation Research Forum paper are important pieces. His earlier work in compiling variation in value of time and analyzing them has had a material impact on public policy.

Bill’s work on costing has been part of his research agenda for the last two decades. His first important piece was in the Transportation Journal (1976). This represented a first attempt to unravel the work that had taken place in the literature and expose the strengths and weaknesses. Subsequently he was part of a UBC team which undertook considerable research into costing approaches and practices, particularly in rail. The book with Woodland in 1984 remains a wonderful compendium of econometric approaches to rail and costing in general. It is required reading for my students at Berkeley. While not in academic journals his work for the AAR is important. It has led to subsequent high quality academic work but the piece with Tretheway (1988), for example, represents an excellent application of rigorous analysis to a major public policy and regulatory issue. Finally, the recent 1996 paper (Logistics & Transportation Review) represents a re-visiting of his work back in 1976 where he identified the trends, pitfalls and unanswered questions in the substantial literature of costing in transportation.

Bill’s productivity work has been produced primarily since 1990. It built on the output of the productivity study group at UBC that undertook a comprehensive assessment of rail costing and productivity in the 1980’s using state of the art theory. The subsequent work not only consisted of considerable primary data collection, organization and integration but also contributed a literature linking productivity and financial performance. The survey article in Transportation Research (1992) was an excellent piece that drew together a large and expanding literature. The article has importance for transportation economists as well as industrial organization economists. The recent Journal of Transport Economics & Policy paper (1997) is an applied piece using state-of-the-art theory and providing the fist discussion of linking productivity and finance and performance. This theme is carried on in the more recent submitted work (e.g. Review of Economics and Statistics).

As a scholar I would rank Bill Waters in the top ten percent of transportation economists in North America and Europe. He has made significant contributions in linking transportation and trade, the practice of benefit-cost analysis and in rail costing and productivity. It has been my experience that Bill has not aimed high enough in placing his research papers in the journals. I would therefore argue that the list of journals in which he has published until lately likely undervalues the importance and contribution of his work. His pedagogic pieces are used in most transportation economics courses in Canada, United States and Europe. These, while not of a scholarly research nature, are still scholarship and of high quality and are to his credit. All of this effort has placed Bill among the better-known people in his profession among international scholars. His work is respected, cited and he is invited to present his ideas to universities, seminars, colloquia and to governments in various parts of the world. As I stated earlier it has not been one or two pathbreaking articles that have built his reputation but rather an accumulation of effort and output.  His recent reception of the TPUG Award I believe is testimony to this and to him. I would certainly regard Bill as a very strong candidate for promotion and deserving of such.

Bill’s legacy I believe is one of a true gentleman, and gentle man who was selfless and sacrificed his career to a significant degree to help others prosper. When Bill retired from UBC we watched a marvelous colleague step away from everyday interaction, fortunately he did not take retirement seriously and spent many days at the Centre for Transportation Studies, ‘mucking about’ as he used to say. His ‘muck’ was always meaningful and always found its way into an article, a speech or a conversation. I will miss his ‘muck’ and his ’mucking about’.

Canada Transportation Act Review Team Remembers Bill

   CTAR AND BILL WATERS

          When the federal government created the Canada Transportation Act Review (CTAR) Panel in the Spring of 1999 to carry out a statutorily-required review of Canada’s transport policies, the terms of its appointment required the Panel to complete its work within a calendar year. This deadline was in stark contrast to earlier transport reviews that had been carried out by Royal Commissions with the power of subpoena, non-fixed budgets and the right to take as much time as commissioners deemed necessary to complete their work. (Interestingly, the next scheduled transport policy review panel will be given 18 months to carry out its mandate.)

          Because of the limited time the CTAR Panel was given, it had to hit the ground running. The disparate group that had been appointed to the Panel quickly found a modest “home” at the corner of McLaren and Elgin Streets, above a pool hall and a DQ. The Panel then made two momentous decisions: it would try to have hearings in every province and territory in Canada and it would use an open and transparent process that no federal Royal Commission or Panel had tried before. This process required every presentation made to the Panel, and much of the Panel’s work, to be posted immediately on the Internet so that everyone in Canada with an interest in what the Panel was doing would know what was happening, in real time. This latter move was subsequently copied by other commissions. Importantly, it allowed the Panel to work much more efficiently and to meet the strict deadlines it had been given.

          As the Panel’s work moved along, it quickly became apparent that Bill Waters would be one of the principal intellectual “engines” of all we were attempting to do. Bill’s deep distrust of oligopoly and monopoly encouraged the Panel to try and find innovative ideas that would foster more competition in modes of transport that were not natural hotbeds of competitive forces. Bill also convinced the Panel that to do our study without considering roads --- the main means of transport in Canada --- would be tantamount to performing Hamlet without the prince. So, despite it being a technical violation of our mandate, we plunged into the (provincial) policy and patronage swamp and studied how roads were built and maintained in Canada. In the process of doing this, the Panel wrote perhaps the most outstanding chapter of its Report, namely, “Chapter 10 --- Paying for Roads”. Bill was crucial in conceiving and writing that chapter, one that still resonates and still awaits inevitable implementation as

                                                -    2    -

Canada’s transport infrastructure continues to deteriorate and as governments have less and less money to spend on this infrastructure.

          The thorny issue of how to foster railway competition in a vast country with only two large railway companies, and many short lines,  challenged a long succession of Royal Commissions --- seven in the 20^th century! --- in Canada. The simple and perennial question that haunted our Panel was that of whether to recommend more “open access” to Canada’s railway system. Prairie farmers and major resource producers, “captive” to one or other of the railways, historically had wanted rail tracks to be open to any train operator for regulated fees that covered only the additional costs they imposed on the rail track owner. On the other hand, the railway companies insisted that any such access should include significant compensation for their invested capital. Again, Bill’s wisdom led us to a compromise that recommended better access to Canada’s rail lines that did not impair the economics of rail maintenance.

          Because, in 1999-2000, there was a looming threat of a takeover of one of Canada’s large railway companies either by the other Canadian railway or a large American one, the Panel spent time looking at how mergers in the railway sector should be handled. The solution the Panel recommended has not yet been adopted by government, and the merger threat has not materialized to date in the rail sector. But the federal government might well have found the Panel’s principles helpful when  faced with the thorny takeovers of a part of Macdonald-Dettwiler and all of Potash Corporation of Canada. Again, Bill’s influence in this chapter was significant.

          Bill was a stickler for good writing. His constant push for clear writing in the Panel’s Report caused him to re-write and edit key portions of our work. As a result, the CTAR Report today, in 2010, still is a joy to read, and possesses a clarity and directness that even George Orwell might appreciate. And Bill was proud, as we all were, that we did not spend all the money that had been allotted by government to the Panel for its work.

                                                    -    3   -

The Panel returned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the federal treasury at the end of its mandate, not a usual occurrence in the world of commissions and panels.

         

When the Panel crossed the “finish line” in late June of 2000, all of us --- especially Bill --- agreed the year of creatively contemplating Canada’s key transport issues had been the best year of our policy lives. Before his sudden death, Bill talked with me and others about mounting a retrospective conference on our Report on what we did right and wrong. I trust such an event will take place in 2011 in Bill’s name and his honour. We will miss him terribly at any retrospective conference and know that, at it, he would modestly try to downplay his central role is what may be the best report ever written on Canada’s transport policies.

                                                          Brian Flemming, CM, QC

                                                          Chairman, CTAR Panel, 1999-2000,

Halifax, Nova Scotia

                                                          8 December 2010

Obituary

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Bill Waters on November 25, 2010. After enjoying a snowy morning out in his yard, he passed away suddenly during a nap in his chair. 

Originally from Kansas City, MO, Bill moved to Vancouver in 1969 with his wife, Joanne having just completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. He joined the Faculty of Economics at the University of British Columbia and spent 34 productive years in both the Economics and Commerce Faculties with a specialization in Transport Economics. In the field of Transportation studies, Bill was widely published and regularly consulted for his expertise by government and private industry alike.  

Outside of professional life, Bill lived life to the fullest. He was a loving and wise father to Wendy and Eric and more recently an enthusiastic Grandpa to Ella, Alex, Megan and Zadie.  

 He was also a man of many hobbies that came and went through different phases of life. As a youngster, he enjoyed activities such as hunting, camping and drag racing which morphed into a lifelong love for tinkering with his dream car, a ’63 Austin Healey.  Bill was an avid outdoorsman and loved fishing, canoeing, kayaking, hiking, as well as both cross country and downhill skiing. He also devoted considerable passion toward target shooting and ice hockey with the UBC Old Birds.

Bill was an avid traveler. This was evident through sabbaticals to England, as well as several to Australia during his professional life. Upon retirement, he and Joanne tried to fit in as many adventures as possible throughout North America in their motor home.

Bill was much loved by his family and was fortunate to have forged many strong friendships that he valued deeply. He will be sorely missed by all.

As per Bill’s wishes, there will be no funeral but true to his Irish roots, a wake is to be held soon. 

In lieu of flowers, please send a donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation: http://www.heartandstroke.bc.ca

Academic Obituary

WATERS, William Glennon II  (Bill) – April 7, 1941 – November 25, 2010

It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Bill Waters, a former editor of the Review. Dr. Waters was a member of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia (UBC) from 1969-2002. He was Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research, E (the Logistics and Transportation Review) (formerly the Logistics and Transportation Review) from 1985-2000, and guided the Review during a critical development period.

He was a PhD graduate of University of Wisconsin. Bill served as President of the Canadian Transportation Research Forum and Director of the Centre for Transportation Research at UBC. He was selected to be a member of the Canada Transportation Act Review Panel and was a major author of its highly cited report. Dr. Waters received the Distinguished Member Award of the Transportation and Public Utilities Group of the American Economic Association, was named a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport and was given a lifetime achievement award of the Canadian Transportation Research Forum.

In addition to teaching at the University of British Columbia, Bill held fellow or visiting professor positions at Oxford University (U.K.), the Australian Bureau of Transport Economics, the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania.

Dr. Waters' early research career focused on the role of transportation costs in the international terms of trade. He was best known for his substantial contributions in the field of railway economics, especially for studies of railway costing, pricing and productivity. In the field of logistics, he undertook a major study of export coal economics, and his study for the World Bank on transportation supply and demand elasticities continues to be widely cited. 

He inspired two generations of students in transportation economics and helped shape government policies in several countries.