Publications
Director Compensation: A Realistic View.
Douglass Wm List. Director’s Monthly, November, 2000. National Association of Corporate Directors. Washington, DC.
During the 1990′s, Mr. List served as an independent director on the boards of two public companies, Harmon Industries (HRMN) and Mark VII (MVII), both o which were acquired at the end of the decade. For both of these companies Mr. List at one time headed the compensation committee of the board. Particularly in the case of Mark VII, Mr. List worked with the CEO to upgrade the board to where it could actively represent shareholder interests while collaborating with the CEO on driving the strategic agenda of the organization. This article articulates the practical framework developed principally at Mark VII for thinking about how director compensation should be structured to attract the right board members and to reinforce board performance expectations.
Controlling the Costs of Heavy Axle Loading with Steerable-Axle Trucks.
H.A. List, D.W. List, V.T. Hawthorne. Proceedings of the Joint Railroad Conference. American Society of Mechanical Engineers and American Railway Engineering Association. October, 1990. New York, NY.
After assuming the role of General Manager of Railway Engineering Associates, Mr. List worked with his father Harold and Terry Hawthorne, VP of Engineering at American Steel Foundries, to summarize twenty years of empirical data relating to the benefits of applying self-steering trucks in heavy axle loading environments (principally unit coal trains). This paper presents the overall economic case for the adoption of self-steering freight car truck technology.
Toward a Functional Market for Freight Car Capacity.
Douglass Wm List. Journal of the Transportation Research Forum. Volume XXX, Number 1, 1989. Alexandria, VA.
Mr. List left his role at CSX as the industry was in the midst of laying the groundwork for deregulating “car hire”, the payments railroads make to one another (and third parties) for the use of freight cars to transport goods which rarely belong to the owner of the car. Mr. List felt strongly that the industry needed to completely break from its historic per hour and per mile cost-based pricing model that incorporated “free” transportation for empty cars and go to a model where the car owner set all prices on trip basis (based on origin and destination) and was responsible for purchasing empty car repositioning under market rates from the railroads, a structure much more analogous to that used in the motor carrier industry. The industry chose to go a different way, and single carload business on the rails has further eroded since the time of this paper.
Microeconomics of Freight Car Supply and Demand.
Douglass Wm List. Catherine S. Cook, George F. List. Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Canadian Transportation Research Forum. 1989. Woodstock, ON.
During the 1980”s, several leading consulting firms pioneered the development of explicit “cost curves” to explain real world pricing phenomena in the marketplace. While at CSX, Mr. List applied this framework to the railroad’s internal “market” for freight car capacity. For the first time, it became very easy to graphically see how freight car capacity supported the profitability of the enterprise, and the radically different costs of providing different “bands” of capacity across the relevant traffic base, where shipment profitability did not always support the highest cost bands of capacity being produced. This framework served as a cornerstone in sorting out fleet investment opportunities and priorities.
Use of Small Buses for Fixed Route Service in Small Urban Areas.
R.N. Robertson, Research Engineer and Douglass W. List, Undergraduate Research Assistant. Virginia Highway and Transportation Research Council (A Cooperative Organization Sponsored Jointly by the Virginia Department of Highways and Transportation and the University of Virginia). 1976. Charlottesville, Virginia.
Mr. List’s first formal foray into the world of transportation planning involved looking at using mini-buses to extend the Charlottesville Transit System into a newly developed suburban area. This report captures many of the issues small communities face as they venture into the provision of public transportation services.
Master’s Thesis: Small City Transit: Analyzing Network Alternatives with UTPS.
Douglass W. List. May, 1977. University of Virginia, School of Engineering and Applied Science. Charlottesville, Virginia. Michael Demetsky, Advisor.
As a Masters student at the University of Virginia, Mr. List was one of the first transportation planners to apply computerized planning models developed for large urban areas to the problems of a small city. The question was whether such a model, often viewed as unwieldily and labor intensive to operate, could in fact be practically applied at a smaller scale. The thesis provides an interesting glimpse into the challenges of computer assisted planning when most computers barely more powerful than today’s smart phone.
