I like seeing bike lanes painted along the right side of the road because they encourage healthy commuting and are designed to keep cyclists like my son safer from collisions with motorists and pedestrians. But like many motorists, I’m a little hesitant when driving near them because the rule in Washington says I should merge into the bike line to make a right turn, and I worry about whether a cyclist will see my turn signal.

When I was growing up, my parents insisted that my four brothers and I learn how to change a tire in case our family car ever got a flat while we were away from home. My father showed us how to make sure the jack was stable and that the lug nuts were tight enough, and insisted we never crawl under the car when it was jacked up. He shared stories about people who had gotten hurt by doing it the wrong way, or stranded because they didn’t know how. What he instilled in us was an understanding that not only could we severely damage the car if we did it wrong, but we could also badly injure ourselves.

I get this question a lot: What’s the difference between a Service Center and a Service Area? The answer is actually pretty simple. Our ATO Service Centers in Atlanta, Fort Worth and Seattle are the office buildings that house the people who provide shared services to employees across each of the three larger geographic Service Areas known as Eastern, Central and Western.

When I was in college, I took courses in a wide variety of subjects – marketing, economics, statistics and science, to name a few. I didn’t realize until I was an adult in the workforce that what had initially seemed to be isolated pockets of knowledge really ended up working together to become much more valuable to me as a whole.

When the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup recently, hockey fans saw how excellent individual performance can contribute to tremendous results for an entire organization. The Caps had trouble in the offseason before, so individual players had to face their shortcomings head on to make it to the next level. Players who had stumbled before dug deep to overcome obstacles, and as a team they strategized together to win.

We got a great look at the benefits of joining forces and collaborating this week.

The ATO, along with our colleagues in Aviation Safety and Airports, hosted a safety summit aimed at making sure all of our airspace users understand and are focused on solutions to a top safety priority – reducing wrong-surface events. A wrong-surface event is when the pilot of an aircraft lands or departs on the wrong runway, taxiway, or the wrong airport. We’ve been seeing far too many of these.

As we prepare for some potentially destructive storms over the coming days, we are employing lessons learned from natural disasters as far back as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and as recently as Maria and Irma last year.

I get frequent updates in my inbox whenever something goes wrong in our national airspace system. Sometimes it’s an equipment outage, or a reported security incident, or an aircraft emergency. What’s key for me and our other ATO decision makers is to fully understand the operational impact of each event so the right people know how to respond to it.

Penn State World Campus tuition discount for federal employees, spouses and dependents. Federal employees are eligible for a 5% tuition reduction on Penn State World Campus online programs. Visit worldcampus.psu.edu/fed-gov for details.

Ever have questions about what paperwork you needed to file, what articles help give you guidance or just how to go about planning your Maternity Leave.

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