Transit agencies in the US use four primary communications mechanisms to dispatch, monitor and manage the operations of their mobile assets: private radio systems, Wi-Fi communications, cellular communications, and track circuits and signaling. Most data communications in the transit industry today are still based on vendor proprietary communications protocols and messaging. This limits agency ...

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...

States and localities are beginning to recognize and act on the connection between health and transportation. A growing number of entities have produced a number of resources, guidance documents, and strategic plans on the topic. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's  NCHRP Research Report 932: A Research Roadmap for Transportation and Public Health builds upon this body ...

As of June 2019, transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft operate in the ground transportation markets at all major domestic commercial airports. The rapid emergence has presented multiple challenges to airport operators, states, regional transit authorities, and city governments. The pre-publication draft of the TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Research Repo...

The needs of airports may vary depending on the types of operations typically conducted at the airport, as well as the type of weather common to the airport. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Syntheis 105: Airport Surface Weather Observation Options for General Aviation Airports aims to provide the operators of general aviation (GA) airports a comprehensive source of informati...

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 Washingt...

The unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) industry is on the cutting edge of aviation innovation. Airports, including tenants and contractors, are discovering the benefits of UAS to their operations and bottom line. Yet, with the diversity of UAS applications at airports, there has been a lack of relevant industry data on this topic to inform the airport industry on current practices. The TRB Airport...

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...

The deployments of automated vehicles, shared mobility services, and other transformational transportation technologies have the potential to dramatically increase safety, reduce congestion, improve access, enhance sustainability, and spur economic development. However, success in meeting these goals is not assured, and there are significant risks that these deployments could cause unintended c...

Travel time reliability is frequently cited as an important metric for the trucking community and users of truck freight services. While the travel time reliability for trucking is commonly measured, truck reliability is seldom considered in the benefit–cost evaluation of mobility projects, which underrepresents the benefits accrued to freight users of the roadway system. The TRB National Coope...

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 ...

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...

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...

Analysis of the erodibility of geomaterials is important for the study of problems related to soil erosion such as bridge scour, embankment overtopping erosion, and stream stability. Erodibility is the relationship between the soil erosion rate and fluid velocity or hydraulic shear stress. Since different soils have different geotechnical properties, their erosion rates vary. The TRB National C...

Accurate traffic forecasts for highway planning and design help ensure that public dollars are spent wisely. Forecasts inform discussions about whether, when, how, and where to invest public resources to manage traffic flow, widen and remodel existing facilities, and where to locate, align, and how to size new ones. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Report 934: Traff...

The condition of sidewalks and pathways affect all pedestrians, but people with disabilities, older adults, and injured veterans are especially affected by them. For instance, among wheelchair users surveyed in the U.S., the wheelchair and the physical environment were the most significant factors limiting community participation. The TRB IDEA (Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis) Progra...

In the current U.S. climate of on-demand transportation services, the development of transactional data specifications for demand-responsive transportation (DRT)—sometimes referred to as “on-demand services”—will help facilitate interaction between software systems that manage DRT services in the United States. The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program's TCRP Research Report 210: Development...

Automated vehicles, shared mobility, and other transformational technologies in transportation provide a unique opportunity to make significant advances in meeting societal goals. TRB's Transportation Research E-Circular 253: Transformational Technologies in Transportation: Impacts on Traditional Research Processes and Programs explores whether and how, in an era of rapidly evolving transformat...

On April 9–10, 2019, 127 freight community members— including transportation professionals from transportation planning agencies, independent consultants, industry experts, and academic researchers from across North America—participated in the second Innovations in Freight Data Workshop in Irvine, California. Alison Conway from City College of New York chaired the planning committee for this wo...

"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...

How do we bring governance into the era of digitization so it can manage demand and supply digitally? At the same time, it is necessary to correct for the existing inequities in our system, working closer with public- and private-sector partners and developing the infrastructure needed to ensure that the transition to shared and autonomous vehicles (SAVs) minimizes the potential challenges and ...

Traditionally, pavement management decision-making has relied on surface cracking as an indicator of structural condition. However, with early-intervention preservation activities to extend the life of pavements, surface cracks no longer are a reliable indicator of structural condition. In the past 15 years, traffic speed deflection devices (TSDDs) have been developed to measure pavement struct...

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...

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...

“Pavement condition data” are essential inputs to the process of managing airport pavements and ensuring safe operations. The technology available today to collect pavement condition data is considerably different from that available even 20 years ago, and new technologies are being developed and introduced into practice at a rapid pace. ACRP Research Report 203: Guidelines for Collecting, Appl...

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...

State transportation agencies will always fulfill a role in the emergency-management effort - for all incidents, from the routine traffic incident through major emergencies to catastrophic events. State agency plans and procedures are expected (indeed required if the agency seeks federal compensation) to be related to state and regional emergency structures and plans. This involves multi-agency...

Since 2009, when NCHRP's last Security 101 report was released, there have been significant advances in transportation security approaches, including new strategies, programs, and ways of doing business that have increased the security of transportation systems as well as ensured their resiliency. Hazards and threats to the system have also continued to evolve since 2009. While the inciden...