Transportation organizations recognize the importance of research, and public agencies are no exception; however, research is one of many competing activities in an agency's budget. To properly assess the value of research, decisionmakers must understand the potential for longer-term rewards; therefore, there is a need to demonstrate, continually, the benefits of research. In 1982, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) increased the attention paid to identifying research benefits by creating an in-house task force on the importance of research. The task force's goal is to publicize benefits from research conducted by public agencies. The products of the task force's efforts are the Research Pays Off (RPO) articles that appear in TRB's bimonthly magazine, TR News. RPO articles highlight research results that provide innovative, cost-effective solutions to important
transportation-related problems. The range of these solutions is multimodal and broad.

The 1st RPO article, "Kansas DOT Saves Its Bridges...and $1 Million Besides," was published in the January–February 1983 issue of TR News; the July–August 2001 issue contained the 100th RPO article. To mark the milestone of the 100th RPO article and to further disseminate the research benefits resulting from public agency research, these 100 RPO articles have been published in portable document format (PDF), and are also available on CD-ROM from our Bookstore.

Future RPO articles will also be available here on TRB's website as they are published.

RPO Articles:

Subject Area Listing

Chronological Listing

Guidelines for Preparation of Research Pays Off Articles

Articles are in Adobe PDF 5.0 Format. Download Acrobat Reader 5.0 for best results.


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