The TRB Centennial Book is available for purchase in ebook or print format. In The Transportation Research Board, 1920–2020: Everyone Interested Is Invited , author Sarah Jo Peterson tells the story of how people and institutions created and have continued to shape TRB. In a compelling narrative accompanied by more than 150 images exploring the history of transportation and research, she argues...

Collecting paper load delivery tickets at highway construction projects is an outdated practice that exposes construction inspectors to many safety hazards. State transportation agencies (STAs) have looked for decades toward automating this process through electronic ticketing, or e-ticketing. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Synthesis 545: Electronic Ticketing of M...

Slope failures pose serious risks for state transportation agencies and federal agencies that own or maintain roads, highways, and/or adjacent property. Many transportation agencies have adopted unstable slope management programs and standards as part of a larger effort to provide an efficient and effective methodology to prevent or control landslides or rockfalls. The TRB National Cooperative ...

Corrosion of steel reinforcement is the primary cause of durability problems in Reinforced- and Prestressed-Concrete (RC and PC) structures. The TRB Highway Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis Program's IDEA Final Report 207: MILDGLASS: GFRP Strand for Resilient Mild Pre-Stressed Concrete developed corrosion-resistant tendons for PC application that, in addition to durability and mechani...

In the development of a quality assurance program, a state highway agency (SHA) incorporates policies and procedures for assessing how well the materials and construction used by a contractor on a construction project satisfy the agency's specifications. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Research Report 946: Procedures and Guidelines for Validating Contractor Test Da...

Issue Number 326 of TR News magazine is available in full to subscribers. Here is a sample from the issue: a 14-page photo collage of the 99th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting from January 12–16, 2020 in Washington, D.C. Do you see yourself in any of the photos?

The March-April 2020 issue of TR News (#326) - including a cover feature on TRB's "century of progress and foundation for the future" of transportation research - is available in hard copy and digital copy for subscribers. For those who are not subscribers, the table of contents is available. Other feature articles in the issue include ones on whether research processes can keep up, accessible ...

Accelerated bridge construction (ABC) utilizes rigorous planning, new technologies, and improved methods to expedite construction. Prefabricated columns and their connections to adjoining bridge members (cap beams, footings, pile caps, and pile shafts) are the most critical components of ABC in moderate- and high-seismic regions. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Res...

Topics in the November–December 2019 issue of TR News include an analysis of the #TRBAM Annual Meeting Twitter hashtag to understand communication dynamics; climate change, a critical transportation issue; assessing, marking, and coding highway structures in emergencies; and more. This issue also kicks off the magazine’s yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of TRB, which will include t...

TRB has released the final print version of TRB Special Report 312: Transportation Investments in Response to Economic Downturns that provides guidance for federal and state officials on the best ways to use stimulus funds for transportation in the future and methods for evaluating such investments. The report examines lessons learned and impacts from the states' management of the transportatio...

One of the most time-honored of the technical activities that TRB performs, state visits revealed lots of interesting issues in 2019, including a lot around the important role state Departments of Transportation increasingly have around data needs. The TRB staff summary of the visits, each of which last one or two days and typically consist of meetings with various levels of DOT management; dis...

The transportation industry faces a wide range of plausible future drivers and scenarios that could affect standard practices over the next 30 to 50 years. Because the range of plausible futures over such a long-term period is very broad, making a focused prediction of the implications for highway infrastructure preservation, maintenance, and renewal (PMR) is quite challenging. The TRB National...

Issue 323 of TRB's magazine complements our recent short video Your Future in Transportation . The September-October 2019 issue  has several features on the workforce topic, including ones called " People, Organizations, Jobs, and Businesses for Tomorrow’s Transportation, "The Future Multimodal Workforce," "How to Win the War for Talent," and "Building a Business Case for Increasing Divers...

In determining what is effective in preventing or slowing ice formation and growth on roadways and bridges, it was found that biomimetic antifreeze molecules (BAMs) would not effectively melt ice once it has formed nor provide additional synergistic benefit to using the molecules in tandem with traditional deicers. Contrastingly, BAMs did prevent freeze-thaw damage in cement paste and concrete....

The January-February 2020 issue of TR News - including a cover feature on the "radical" transportation logistics of the Burning Man festival - is available in hard copy and digital copy for subscribers. For those who are not subscribers, the table of contents is available. Other feature articles in the issue include ones on data's critical role in transportation decisions, the transportation ne...

Large-scale, complex airport construction projects have the same issues as construction projects on a smaller scale, but they present a series of specialized legal issues. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Legal Research Digest 38: Legal Issues Related to Large-Scale Airport Construction Projects focuses on those legal issues causing the most significant risks during planning,...

State transportation agencies are increasingly tasked with doing more with less in managing highway transportation networks. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Research Report 923: Workforce Optimization Workbook for Transportation Construction Projects provides state transportation agencies with guidance to identify their construction staffing needs and how to best a...

Scaling loose rocks from slopes adjacent to highways is a simple and effective measure for temporarily reducing the risk of rockfall potential on naturally occurring bedrock outcrops and highway rock–soil cuts. However, the current practice in estimating scope of work and contracting rock scaling projects are inconsistent from agency to agency. Many owners and transportation agencies conduct sc...

A long-existing challenge to the bridge engineering community is how to achieve fast construction while ensuring a structure’s integrity and sustainability. The TRB Highway Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis Program's IDEA Final Report 188: A Class of V-Connectors for Bridge Deck-Pier and Pier-Footing Joints with the Combined Advantage of Integrated Design and Seismic Isolation while En...

A programmatic approach to sustainable materials procurement in highway construction may be better than one-off attempts. For now, there is little guidance on procuring sustainability in highway construction and sustainability is not as important as cost or schedule. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Web-Only Document 262: Sustainable Highway Construction describes t...

Sustainability is often an element that informs decisions made during the planning, programming, and design phases of highway construction projects. However, the construction phase of a highway project is also an opportunity to advance sustainability. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Research Report 916: Sustainable Highway Construction Guidebook provides clear and ...

The Wisconsin DOT issues both single- and multi-trip permits for Oversize–Overweight (OSOW) vehicles. As the number of OSOW vehicle permits issued in Wisconsin have increased in recent years, the management and analysis of OSOW permit data has become more labor-intensive and time-consuming. This "Research Pays Off" feature in  TR News edition 324 (November-December 2019), by Hani Titi, Nic...

This article is adapted from The Transportation Research Board, 1920–2020: Everyone Interested Is Invited , to be published by the National Academies Press in January 2020. TRB can be best understood as an infrastructure—one that people purposely designed, carefully constructed, and devotedly maintained to share and strengthen knowledge about transportation. The core missions and structures tha...

The November-December 2019 issue of TR News —with a focus on climate change resilience—is available in hard copy and digital copy for subscribers. For those who are not subscribers, the table of contents is available. Other feature articles in the issue include ones on the history of both TRB and transportation in general and a preview of the TRB Annual Meeting slated for January in Washington ...

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...

Concrete is a porous material that allows materials to move through it. The number of pores connected in the concrete, also known as the permeability, influences the ability of fluids to penetration the concrete. And this permeability parameter is an important transport mechanism for freeze-thaw damage, corrosion, alkali silica reaction, and sulfate attack. The TRB Innovations Deserving Explora...

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...

The performance of flexible and rigid pavements is known to be closely related to properties of the base, subbase, and/or subgrade. However, some recent research studies indicate that the performance predicted by this methodology shows a low sensitivity to the properties of underlying layers and does not always reflect the extent of the anticipated effect, so the procedures contained in the Ame...

TRB’s Technical Activities Division has released Transportation Research Circular E-C249: Key Elements of Construction Quality Assurance for Implementation, presenting a synopsis of " Quality Assurance: There’s Value in the Basics," held at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board. In this session, four speakers with a range of perspectives—the Federal Highway Administration...

The uses and levels of maturity of five advanced technology areas visualization and modeling, interconnected technologies, safety technologies, instrumentation and sensors, and unmanned aircraft systems in transportation highway construction projects are documented in TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 534: Emerging Technologies for Construction Delivery. The ...