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 Washingt...

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...

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...

TRB’s Technical Activities Division has released Transportation Research Circular E-C248: 12th International Conference on Low-Volume Roads, highlighting topics including road surfaces, geotechnology, cold regions and climate change, pavement management, planning and economics, unpaved roads management, geosynthetics in low-volume roads, drainage and stream crossings, climate change resiliency,...

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 532: Seismic Design of Non-Conventional Bridges documents seismic design approaches and criteria used for “non-conventional” bridges, such as long-span cable-supported bridges, bridges with truss tower substructures, and arch bridges. Design of conventional bridges for seismic demands in the United States is based on one of t...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP)  Research Report 903: Geotechnical Asset Management for Transportation Agencies, Volume 2: Implementation Manual presents a manual that can be used to implement Geotechnical Asset Management (GAM) planning. Volume 1 , Research Overview, details the scope, process, and findings of the study. The management of bridge and pavement as...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 903: Geotechnical Asset Management for Transportation Agencies provides an introduction and scalable guidance for state transportation agencies on how to implement risk-based geotechnical asset management into current asset management plans. Volume 1, Research Overview, details the scope, process, and findings of the st...

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Web-Only Document 260: Proposed Refinements to Design Procedures for Geosynthetic Reinforced Soil (GRS) Structures in AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications explores the effect of adopting a closely‐spaced reinforcement layout in geosynthetic‐reinforced soil structures. While research since the early 1980s has identified the benefici...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Web-Only Document 258: Manual on Subsurface Investigations provides an update to the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) 1988 manual of the same name. This report reflects the changes in the approaches and methods used for geotechnical site characterization that the geotechnical community has develop...

TRB has released Critical Issues in Transportation 2019 . In this report, which is updated periodically by the TRB Executive Committee, a series of challenging questions are posed to explore issues and opportunities that may arise 10 to 20 years into the future. These questions, 63 in all, have been organized into 12 topic areas and provide a way to frame future areas of research, policy analys...

TRB Special Report 329: Renewing the National Commitment to the Interstate Highway System: A Foundation for the Future explores pending and future federal investment and policy decisions concerning the federal Interstate Highway System. Congress asked the committee to make recommendations on the “features, standards, capacity needs, application of technologies, and intergovernmental roles to up...

TRB's Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) latest Impacts on Practice explores the impact ACRP Synthesis 39 : Airport Wildlife Population Management has had on integrated wildlife management plans at airports. A wildlife biologist at Orlando International Airport utilized this report to develop a holistic approach to mitigating bird strikes with a specific species of heron that thrives i...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) Final Report 186: Development of an Electrical Probe for Rapid Assessment of Ground Improvement explores new technologies that can be used in soil improvement. Soil improvement has numerous applications in transportation construction, including embankment stabilization, underpinning bri...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board has released 12 early access papers addressing geotechnology, including: A Process for Optimizing Gradation of Marginal Backfill of Mechanically Stabilized Earth Walls to Achieve Acceptable Resistivity ( link ) Pullout Behavior of Steel Mechanically Stabilized Earth Reinforcements ( link ) Soil–Geosynthetic Inter...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 519: The Renewal of Stormwater Systems Using Trenchless Technologies summarizes technologies used for the renewal of stormwater systems, including new, emerging, and underutilized trenchless methods, and identifies future research needs. Both trenchless replacement and trenchless renewal methods can reduce negative impacts as...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 515: Practices for Preventing Roadway Departures identifies and summarizes practices being used by state departments of transportation (DOTs) to prevent roadway departure crashes and to identify the data-driven advantages and disadvantages of these practices. More than half of all traffic fatalities result from roadway depart...

To keep pace with accelerating rate of research distribution, the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board is now publishing articles as soon as they are finalized. The latest papers to be published are as follows: Use of a Laser Diffractometer to Obtain the Particle Size Distribution of Fine-Grained Soils Interstate Speed Profiles Conditioning and Testing Pr...

TRB's E-Circular 230: Culverts and Soil–Structure Interaction: Fifty Years of Change and a Twenty-Year Projection summarizes the presentations from the TRB 93rd Annual Meeting on January 14, 2014 in Washington, D.C. In the past 40 to 50 years have seen significant changes in the pipe industry in terms of materials used, structure sizes, shapes, and joint capabilities. Design methodologies ...

The full edition of the July–August 2017  TR News  magazine is now available.  Moving research into practice is the theme of feature articles in this edition. Authors describe today’s successes, present a systematic approach that has proved effective at a state department of transportation, describe federal programs encouraging innovations at the state level, discuss initiatives ...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2657 consists of 11 papers that explore geotechnical engineering, including: Long-Term Durability Studies on Chemically Treated Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement Material as a Base Layer for Pavements Effect of Microbial-Induced Calcite Precipitation on Surface Erosion and Scour of Granular Soils: Proof of Concept ...

The full edition of the May-June 2017 TR News is now available. This edition explores the role of transportation in economic development. Articles feature information about benefit-cost analysis, freight production models, transportation satellite accounts, and right sizing strategies. The TR News is TRB's bimonthly magazine featuring timely articles on innovative and state-of-the-art research ...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (IDEA) has released Final Report 181: Development of Small Specimen Geometry for Asphalt Mixture Performance Testing. The use of small specimen geometries in Asphalt Mixture Performance Tester (AMPT) offer a means to measure as-built pavement layers. Small specimen geometries may improve the e...

A featured article in the May-June 2017 issue of the TR News examines how to develop appropriate evaluation frameworks that account for the integration of new technologies into the infrastructure in order to accurately value the current highway system. The TR News is TRB's bimonthly magazine featuring timely articles on innovative and state-of-the-art research and practice in all modes of trans...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) latest Research Topic Highlights explores Bank Erosion and Bridge Scour. It summarizes the results of several research projects to better quantify and model the mechanisms of bridge scour. Included are summaries of bank erosion and countermeasures, bridge scour countermeasures, predictive equations for scour, and special cases involvin...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Web-Only Document 235: Quantifying the Influence of Geosynthetics on Pavement Performance develops a methodology for quantifying the influence of geosynthetics on pavement performance for use in pavement design and analysis. This project focused on the use of geosynthetics in unbound base/subbase layers or as a base/subgrade interface ...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2656 consists of 8 papers that explore geological engineering, including: Comparison of California Bearing Ratio and Pin Puncture Strength Testing Used in the Evaluation of Geotextiles Coupled Thermo-Hydro-Mechanical Analysis of Freeze–Thaw Behavior of Pavement Structure over a Box Culvert Jump-Starting a Ge...

TRB has released its requirements for submitting papers for presentation at the 2018 TRB Annual Meeting and/or publication in the Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board . This guide covers the organization and formatting of manuscripts for peer review and for publication, as well as instructions for submission. Papers that do not follow the guidelines will ...

The latest of TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Ready Results examines NCHRP Research Results Digest 391 : Modulus-Based Construction Specification for Compaction of Earthwork and Unbound Aggregate. Proper compaction of roadway base and subbase is vital to ensure good pavement performance throughout its life span. Modulus, a measure of stiffness, predicts the performan...