Racism has been overt in transportation. For example, the segregation of races on intercity trains led to the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” Supreme Court doctrine that stood for more than half a century. While many discriminatory policies have been reversed by the courts and in constitutional amendments, their impacts on society have not been fully remedied and persist. TRB’s Racial Equity Addendum to Critical Issues in Transportation  is intended to be a step in the process ...

The year 2020’s raging coronavirus pandemic and reckoning with long-standing racial injustice led to widespread disruption and suffering, social unrest, and renewed calls for an accounting of our fragmented public health system and troubled history of racial inequity. The crises of 2020 transcend transportation yet also raise fundamental questions for it along with other sectors of our society and economy. In this addendum to Critical Issues in Transportation 2019 , the Transportation Research Board (TRB...

The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities may take to build and measure their resilience. This report also provides recommendations to th...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released Assessing the Risks of Integrating Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System. This consensus study examines the various ways that risk can be defined and applied to integrating these Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System managed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). It also identifies needs for additional research and developmental opportunities in this field. When discus...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that examines the current state of U.S. graduate STEM education. The report explores how the system might best respond to ongoing developments in the conduct of research on evidence-based teaching practices and in the needs and interests of its students and the broader society it seeks to serve. The report is designed to be a resource for the primary stakeholders in the U.S. STEM enterprise, including federal and state po...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that examines which interventions (programs, systems, and policies) are most promising to prevent injuries and death from alcohol-impaired driving, the barriers to action and approaches to overcome them, and which interventions need to be changed or adopted. This report makes broad-reaching recommendations that will serve as a blueprint for the nation to accelerate the progress in reducing alcohol-impaired driving fatalit...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that examines the effectiveness of the use of the percentile ranks produced by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA’s) Safety Measurement System (SMS) for identifying high-risk carriers, and if not, what alternatives might be preferred. In addition, this report evaluates the accuracy and sufficiency of the data used by SMS, to assess whether other approaches to identifying unsafe carriers would identif...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that summarizes the rationale and need for supporting a comprehensive U.S. research program in atmospheric chemistry; comments on the broad trends in laboratory, field, satellite, and modeling studies of atmospheric chemistry; determines the priority areas of research for advancing the basic science of atmospheric chemistry; and identifies the highest priority needs for improvements in the research infrastructure to addre...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released an abbreviated version of a restricted report that assesses the potential of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) in enhancing future U.S. naval operations. The Department of the Navy has determined that the final report prepared by the committee is restricted in its entirety under exemption 3 of the Freedom of Information Act (5 USC § 552 (b) (3)), via 10 USC § 130 and therefore cannot be made available to the public. TRB is part of...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that summarizes the discussions and presentations from an August 2014 workshop that explored issues related to applying materials state awareness to condition-based maintenance and system life cycle management. The workshop was structured around three focal topics: (1) advances in metrology and experimental methods, (2) advances in physics-based models for assessment, and (3) advances in databases and diagnostic technolog...