Commuter rail services bring travelers from the rural and suburban fringes to the inner neighborhoods and central business districts of many large metropolitan areas in the U.S. The isolated nature of these rural and suburban commuter rail parking lots makes it difficult and expensive to secure and safely operate these transit assets. Further, as the more than two dozen commuter rail systems in...

Self-driving cars, rising temperatures and sea levels, increasingly strong weather events, changing citizen preferences, and innovations in technologies that are revolutionizing purchasing behavior, social interaction, financial transactions, communications, and travel—the transportation world is changing very rapidly. Transportation Research Circular E-C256: Managing Transportation Systems in ...

Recent studies show that organizations with the most diverse workforces realize better decision-making and more efficiency, innovation, and profitability than do their less-diverse peers. This article in TR News Issue 323 (September/October 2019) details demographic trends shaping the nation’s workforce—the large millennial population, the rise of neurodiverse workers, and dramatically increase...

More airport operations/management academic programs at both the high school and community college levels would help the airport industry. With baby boomers currently reaching retirement age at the rate of 10,000 each day, and later generations much smaller in size, new employees are not entering the workforce swiftly enough to replace those leaving because of retirement, illness, and other com...

The U.S. transportation system is developed, operated, and managed by private and public enterprises and, as of 2012, employs approximately 4.3 million people. This number is even larger when it accounts for people whose jobs are entirely dependent on the transportation system, from delivering fresh lettuce year-round to a fast response to a fire alarm to the reliable delivery of children to sc...

About $1.5 trillion will be spent globally on airport infrastructure by 2030, a ccording to the International Air Transport Association.  Most of that enormous amount of money will be spent on projects that must be constructed without disrupting airport operations. Given the focus on schedule and on the cost of failing to complete the construction during the periods of planned outages, the...

Access to relevant, precise, and timely information is crucial for a pleasant experience in air travel. Travelers with cognitive and sensory disabilities, aging travelers, and travelers with limited English proficiency need alternative approaches to those provided for general travelers for accessing and communicating air travel information. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Sy...

As a reliever airport for the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, Phoenix–Mesa Gateway Airport must keep track of information for nearly 300,000 aircraft operations and 1.4 million passengers a year. To meet this challenge, the airport developed an innovative, digitally connected solution with the help of ACRP Research Report 182: Guidancefor Planning, Design, and Operationsof Airport Com...

Environmental regulations have long required airports to undertake review of many actions associated with planning and development. More recently, airports have embraced sustainability as a means for ensuring the long-term viability and community benefits of their facilities. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Research Report 209: Integrating Sustainability Planning and the Env...

The May–June 2019 issue of TR News addresses women and gender in transportation. Developed by the TRB Standing Committee on Women’s Issues in Transportation, this theme issue explores topics including statistics about the negative effects of women’s unequitable transportation access on the global economy; women and transit; a case study from Austria on women’s travel constraints; and the challe...

Estimates indicate that more than 14 million jobs—about 11% of civilian jobs in the United States—are related to infrastructure. Transportation has the potential to be a major U.S. job creator with projections to add 417,000 net jobs from 2012 to 2022. An additional 4.2 million workers will need to be hired to fill vacancies created by people leaving the transportation workforce. Transportation...

Recent federal legislation has established requirements for agencies to set performance targets and report on safety, pavement, and bridge conditions; transit asset state of good repair; system performance; freight; and mobile source emissions. These requirements have resulted in increased visibility and attention to Transportation Performance Management (TPM) and increased awareness of the imp...

In 2017, when leadership at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) decided to build a new International Arrivals Facility (IAF), they knew they had to leverage airport resources in a cost-effective manner to enhance customer experience. At nearly 50 years old, the existing facility could no longer accommodate Sea-Tac’s demand for international travel, which grew 107 percent from 2007 to...

Many airports undertake stormwater projects to accommodate facility expansion, address obsolescence, and respond to evolving regulatory requirements. Often, stormwater infrastructure is installed or upgraded on a project-by-project and piecemeal basis, resulting in mismatches of sizes, material types, ages, and conditions. When airports are considering expanding or improving their stormwater fa...

Introduction of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) will pose safety, economic, operational, regulatory, community, environmental, and infrastructure challenges to airports. These risks are further complicated by the dynamic nature of UAS technological development. Experiences and lessons learned from recent major aviation system changes demonstrate the critical importance of ensuring that airports...

It is anticipated that unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) will increase in activity within the airport environment and will expand due to market demand, operational requirements, and changes in UAS specifications (such as size, weight, and payload). To date, the majority of small UAS, defined as less than 55 pounds, operate outside of the airport environment. However, some public airports are curr...

Major technological and security changes in the aviation industry over the past 20 years have forced airport leaders and aviation stakeholders to think of new research ideas that will improve the planning and development of policies and new models that foster growth of air service, incorporate new airport and customer technology, revise airport business models, and better interact with neighbor...

"Big data" is not new, but applications in the field of transportation are more recent, having occurred within the past few years, and include applications in the areas of planning, parking, trucking, public transportation, operations, ITS, and other more niche areas. A significant gap exists between the current state of the practice in big data analytics (such as image recognition and graph an...

The U.S. Navy has many unique naval engineering needs that demand a highly capable and robust U.S. naval engineering enterprise. In seeking an independent review of the unclassified elements of its National Naval Responsibilities—Naval Engineering (NNR-NE) program, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) asked for recommendations on ways to ensure the program meets the many naval engineering re...

Freight investment project prioritization, which is used to assist in planning and programming decisions, differs widely in importance across states. One of the reasons for the difference in importance is the fact that freight projects are costly, and state departments of transportation (DOTs) face limited resources to implement them. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Sy...

Public transit agencies are increasingly partnering with mobility service providers. Among these providers are transportation network companies (TNCs), which include companies like Uber and Lyft and are the specific focus of this research effort. The transit industry has produced research to describe primary considerations transit agencies should have in mind for partnerships with TNCs, but exi...

Examples of transformational technologies—many are discussed in technical and popular media—include wireless telecommunications, shared vehicles, connected vehicles, fully autonomous vehicles, alternative-fuel vehicles, smart cities and communities, big data analytics, internet-of-things, as well as UAVs or drones, 3-D printing, and more. Public agencies face significant challenges continuing t...

Guidance to public and private stakeholders on mitigating and adapting to logistical disruptions to supply chains resulting from regional, multi-regional, and national adverse events, both unanticipated and anticipated, is provided in  NCFRP (National Cooperative Freight Research Program) Research Report 39: Freight Transportation Resilience in Response to Supply Chain Disruptions . The re...

Global business and tourism depend heavily on the efficient operation of airports and movement of passengers, baggage, and cargo across many areas. With increasing demand and connectivity requirements for airports comes the need for more sophisticated simulation and modeling tools to validate design assumptions. Furthermore, airport design and planning decisions have significant impacts on poli...

Airports — especially in the past two decades—have generally sought to promote and increase collaboration among the members of the airport community, particularly between an airport and its airlines. One metric of this trend has been the increase in the number of U.S. airports with full-time emergency managers, from fewer than 10 in 2007 to more than 120 today. Collaboration and increased profe...

Airports continually balance demands to improve infrastructure within the realities of available budgets. Green revolving funds (GRFs) offer an alternative approach for investing in projects that generate operational savings. These funds work by tracking verified cost reductions from implemented actions, and then transferring those savings to a reserve that provides capital for future qualified...

U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) ship stability regulations governing the  ability of a vessel to return to an upright position after being disturbed is the focus of a  new TRB publication,  Review and Update of U.S. Coast Guard Vessel Stability Regulations and Guidance.  The authors advise the  USCG  on how it can make its stability regulations more usable and complete in ...

Turning movement count data is key to evaluating the performance of signalized intersections and is also a crucial component of data-driven decision-making processes of transportation agencies. Unfortunately, the availability of quality turning movement count data is not the norm for transportation agencies. The National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Innovations Deserving Explora...

"Upgauging” is an airline industry technique enabling air carriers to increase capacity by adding seats to existing jets and replacing smaller planes with larger ones. While these practices are generally the result of airline network and system-wide strategies, their impacts are often experienced at the local level by the airport community. Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Synthesis ...

Most rail trespassing casualties can be avoided. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and its safety partners conducted studies to better target and implement outreach, public education, and law enforcement efforts. The results, along with national workshops, led to the Community Trespass Prevention Guide, which documents a collaborative, step-by-step problem-solving approach for local com...