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 Data Matters: Ethics, Data, and International Research Collaboration in a Changing World: Proceedings of a Workshop. The publication summarizes an event held on March 14-16, 2018, in Washington, DC that explored the changing opportunities and risks of data management and use across disciplinary domains. The third workshop in a series, participants gathered to examine advisory principles for consideration when developing internatio...

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 Academy of Engineering’s Center for Engineering Ethics and Society (CEES) released summarizes of presentations and discussions from a January 11–12, 2017, workshop designed to help the engineering community identify institutional and cultural challenges to instilling ethics in engineering programs; and to develop approaches, programs, strategies, and collaborations to overcome those challenges. The workshop was a follow-on activity to the 2016 CEES report Infusing Ethics into the Development...

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has released the proceedings of a December 2016 workshop designed to help better understand the importance of affordable and accessible housing for older adults and people with disabilities, the barriers to providing this housing, the design principles for making housing accessible for these individuals, and the features of programs and policies that successfully provide affordable and accessible housing that supports community living for olde...

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...