Federal laws and regulations affect transportation agencies in their business practices, construction of facilities, hiring, and services provided to the public. TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Legal Research Digest 77: Update of Selected Studies in Transportation Law, Volume 8, Section 1: Civil Rights and Transportation Agencies is designed to help state highway departments and transportation agencies keep abreast of operating practices and legal elements of specific problems...

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 policy and major capital improvement decisions, which can be supported by simulation and modeling tools at many leve...

Medical literature has identified transportation as a factor in missed and shortened dialysis treatments, which leads to negative health outcomes. These adverse outcomes include, among others, increased hospitalizations because patients do not receive their scheduled treatments. For public transportation agencies, dialysis transportation has become a critical concern as increasing numbers of individuals with end stage renal disease turn to their community’s public transit service for their six trips each...

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 541 explores how state departments of transportation (DOTs) and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) acquire proprietary data for transportation applications. Recent technological advancements have led to new types of transportation data with characteristics that include improved quality and greater temporal and wider geographical coverage than traditional data sets. State DOTs and MPOs face challenges associated with obtaining n...

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Legal Research Digest (LRD) 76 examines the intersection of transportation law and Indian law as it relates to federal, state, and local transportation agencies. The LRD provides background information on Indians, tribes, and the history of the federal government’s Indian policy and Indian law and explores jurisdiction in Indian country beginning with three basic concepts (inherent tribal sovereignty, Indians and tribal membership, and Indian co...

ACRP Research Report 198: Wetland Mitigation, Volume 2, A Guidebook for Airports explores how to mitigate potential impacts to wetlands from airport construction, expansion, and safety improvements. The report addresses a broad range of issues, including: • Concerns over the creation of potential wildlife hazards; • Existing requirements, which may or may not be conflicting; • Impact to existing and future airport development; • Airport considerations of cost and logistics in developing mitigation and re...

TRB's Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) LRD 37: Legal Issues Relating to Airports Promoting Competition explores permissible means and methods of encouraging and accommodating competition at U.S. airports. It discusses the history of how competition has been addressed by government and airports and provides the context of the concentration of air carriers and fixed-base operators (FBOs), the accommodation of air carriers with differing business models, and avoiding the grant of exclusive rights...

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Synthesis 142: Implementing the U.S. DOT Reasonable Modification Rule provides an overview of the current state of practice regarding transit systems implementation of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) regulation 49 C.F.R Part 37. The report describes the experiences of agencies as they make reasonable modifications to their practices and policies in order to both respond to the regulation and en...

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 analysis, and debate. Critical issues identified in this report deserve attention because of transportation’s central ...

TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Legal Research Digest 54: Impacts of the Americans with Disabilities Act on Transit Agency Liability explores the types of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements and legal claims against transit agencies. The ADA has transformed U.S. transit agencies, which now have sophis­ticated programs to address a wide variety of accessibility  goals in such areas as the design of transit stations, bus and rail vehicle design, media stop announcement...