The TRB Annual Meeting paper submission site is now open! Follow the guidelines to submit your paper for possible presentation at the 2026 meeting by August 1.

Recognize outstanding people-oriented initiatives in any area of transportation. TRB's Sharon Banks Award honors individuals whose accomplishments reflect her compassion and strength of character by making a meaningful impact on the lives of those who use, deliver, or support transportation services. Nominate a deserving candidate by July 31!

Transportation technology has been at the core of TRB and the National Academy of Sciences since the beginning. Created during the U.S. Civil War, the organization immediately helped the Navy, investigating magnetic deviations to design an accurate compass for new ironclad ships. Today, this notion applies to emerging innovations such as highly automated vehicles and trucks, which build on the incremental introduction of, and controversy about, automation in aviation that began only a few years after the first flights at Kitty Hawk.

The latest advancements in technology to manage roadway networks also have the potential to save lives through connectivity. In TRB's new short video, Carlos M. Braceras, Executive Director of the Utah Department of Transportation and a member of the TRB Executive Committee, discusses how his state is connecting infrastructure to vehicles.

Also take a look at the new National Academies Press Transformational Technology in Transportation Collection.

Declining seat space for passengers on commercial airplanes coupled with the growing prevalence of passengers with larger body sizes in the U.S. has provoked concerns in recent years over the lack of seat dimension regulations and over whether there could be impacts on the speed of emergency evacuations.

The Federal Aviation Administration has the authority to regulate seat dimensions for safety reasons, so as part of its response to these concerns, the agency commissioned a set of seat experiments and cabin evacuation time trials from its Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI). CAMI’s study looked in particular at the potential effects of seat width and pitch, and at the institute’s request, TRB and the National Academies conducted an independent peer review of their study, released today: TRB Special Report 358: Peer Review of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Study of the Effects of Passenger Seat Width and Pitch on Airplane Evacuation Performance.

TRB's Top Downloaded Publication in June: TRB Special Report 357: The Air Traffic Controller Workforce Imperative: Staffing Models and Their Implementation to Ensure Safe and Efficient Airspace Operations (released June 18, 2025)

TRB and the National Academies released a consensus report on air traffic controller staffing and it has generated plenty of interest, including articles by The New York Times, Reuters, Flying Magazine, Federal News Network, Georgia Tech, and many others.