TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 888: Development of Roundabout Crash Prediction Models and Methods provides crash prediction models that quantify the expected safety performance of roundabouts for motorized and non-motorized road users. Safety performance factors (SPF) and crash modification factors (CMF) are predictive models that estimate expected c...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis Report 527: Resilience in Transportation Planning, Engineering, Management, Policy, and Administration documents resilience efforts and how they are organized, understood, and implemented within transportation agencies’ core functions and services. Core functions and services include planning, engineering, construction, maint...

TRB's Transportation Research Circular E-C242: A Literature Review of Rail Trespassing and Suicide Prevention Research reviews and summarizes available research reports and data sources related to the issues of railroad trespassing and suicide, focusing on research from 2013 onwards. This report explores incidences of rail-related trespassing and suicide based on several factors, including leth...

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's E-Circular 239: Arterial Roadways Research Needs and Concerns: Informing the Planning, Design, and Operation of Arterial Roadways Considering Public Health explores the planning, design, and operation of arterials considering public health. This report presents a series of descriptive examples where arterials and health concerns appear in practice and identifies how and where health could...

This annual report presents a summary of progress on investigations conducted as part of the Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exploratory Analysis (Rail Safety IDEA) program sponsored by the Federal Railroad Administration and overseen by the Transportation Safety IDEA Program Committee. The Rail Safety IDEA program provides funding for projects that promote innovative approaches to improving ...

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) Legal Research Digest 36: Legal Issues Related to Implementation and Operation of SMS for Airports provides a review of potential legal issues, an in-depth analysis of identified issues, and the benefits experienced by airports that develop and operate a Safety Management Systems (SMS). Implementation of SMS in the airport and aviation sector ha...

A featured article in the November-December 2018 issue of the TR News examines the implementation and results of various designated driving programs to deter alcohol-impaired driving. 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 transportation. It also includes brief news items of interest to the trans...

The November-December 2018 edition of the TR News explores a study conducted by NASEM about alcohol-impaired driving. This edition also features articles about the U.S. Department of Transportation's Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program, TRB's Inclusion and Diversity Initiative, and information about recent TRB reports. The TR News is TRB's bimonthly magazine featuring timely articles on i...

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 Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) latest Impacts on Practice examines how Fresno Yosemite International Airport officials used ACRP Report 103 : A Guidebook for Integrating NIMS for Personnel and Resources at Airports. The report guided the creation of a training program for Fresno Fire Department firefighters contracted to serve at the on-airport aircraft rescue and firefightin...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has released a pre-publication, non-edited version of Research Report 894: Evaluating the Performance of Longitudinal Barriers on Curved, Superelevated Roadway Sections. Curved, high-speed roadways are usually superelevated to make the curved roadway easier for vehicles to navigate. However, the angle of these roadways can cause an inc...

The latest edition of Research Pays Off explores how to leverage pavement technology to develop safer pavement marking systems. This article discusses how the Florida Department of Transportation measures the retroreflectivity of a road according to “30-m" geometry and stored all data in a comprehensive and easily accessible database.   The TR News is TRB's bimonthly magazine featuring tim...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Web-Only Document 252: A Strategic Approach to Transforming Traffic Safety Culture to Reduce Deaths and Injuries provides guidance on developing a strategic approach to transform the traffic safety culture of road users and stakeholders. The goal is to use this approach to sustain improvements in traffic safety for all road users, incl...

TRB E-Circular 236: National Academies–TRB Forum on Preparing for Automated Vehicles and Shared Mobility summarizes the deliberations of a TRB forum launched in early 2018 to facilitate evidence-based research needed to deploy automated vehicle technologies in a manner and timeframe that informs policy to meet long-term goals. The deployments of automated vehicles, shared mobility services, and...

TRB's Rail Safety Innovations Deserving Exporatory Analysis (IDEA) program has released Safety Report 32: Railroad Bridge Inspections for Maintenance and Replacement Prioritization Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with Laser Scanning Capabilities. Measuring bridge movement under trains in the field is difficult and expensive because a fixed reference point is not normally available, thus c...

TRB’s Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board has released 18 early access papers addressing safety issues, including: Identification of Site Characteristics for Proactive High-Friction Surface Treatment Site Selection using Sensor-Based, Detailed, Location-Referenced Curve Characteristics Data ( link ) Safety Evaluation of Destination Lighting Treatment at ...

Twenty-seven percent of fatal crashes occur at horizontal curves, although they account for less than 10 percent of public roadway miles. Knowing where horizontal curves are located and their geometric characteristics are key to successfully addressing curve safety issues. Curve information is also essential for accurate placement of warning signs as safety treatment, especially where a curve h...

TRB Special Report 323: In-Service Performance Evaluation of Guardrail End Treatments develops a research design for evaluating the in-service performance of guardrail end treatments and other roadside safety devices and identifies the data required to do so. Given the substantial data requirements and methodological challenges of conducting successful evaluations of particular end treatments, ...

In 2012, Congress gave the U.S. Federal Transit Administration (FTA) the authority to establish a new comprehensive framework to oversee the safety of the country’s public transit systems. As part of that framework, state and local transit agencies are required to engage in safety planning. In the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act of 2015, Congress asked the National Academies of Scie...

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...

TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Report 193: Tools and Strategies for Eliminating Assaults Against Transit Operators, Volume 2: User Guide  provides potential countermeasures and strategies to prevent or mitigate assaults against transit operators. The User Guide includes an operator assault risk management toolbox developed to support transit agencies in their ef...

TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Report 193: Tools and Strategies for Eliminating Assaults Against Transit Operators, Volume 1: Research Overview provides the materials and methodology used to produce potential countermeasures and strategies to prevent or mitigate assaults against transit operators. Transit industry policies, practices, and operating procedures related...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released its proceedings of a workshop hosted in January 2018 that explores best practices and lessons learned from other high-risk, high-reliability industries for the benefit of the research community and of citizens, industry practitioners, decision makers, and officials addressing safety in the offshore oil industry. Since th...

TRB's E-Circular 232: Automated Vehicle Symposium 2017: Summary of a Symposium highlights the themes from an event that took place on July 11–13, 2017 in San Francisco, California. The event explored the development, testing, building, and deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs). The 2017 AVS provided the opportunity for communication, collaboration, and information sharing on a wide range of t...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 875: Guidance for Evaluating the Safety Impacts of Intersection Sight Distance is a resource for practitioners involved in the planning, design, operations, and traffic safety management of stop-controlled intersections. It provides information on how to estimate the effect of intersection sight distance (ISD) on crash ...

TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program ( NCHRP) Web-Only Document 228 : Safety Impacts of Intersection Sight Distance documents the methodology and presents the results from NCHRP Research Report 875 : Guidance for Evaluating the Safety Impacts of Intersection Sight Distance. It provides  the underlying research on estimating the safety effects of intersection sight distance (...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released a report that identifies challenges to establishing a real-time system-wide safety assurance (RSSA) system and the high-priority research that should be implemented by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and other interested parties in government, industry, and academia to expedite development of suc...

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...