TRB mourns the passing of TRB Executive Committee member Hani Mahmassani, who was the William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation at Northwestern University, as well as Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences. He also served as Director of the Northwestern University Transportation Center and Director of the U.S. Department of Transportation Center of Excellence on Telemobility.

Mahmassani pioneered work in modeling and understanding individual behavior in complex transportation networks to enhance system planning, design, and operation in support of societal and sustainability goals. His achievements were recognized with several TRB honors, including the Thomas B. Deen Distinguished Lectureship in 2016 and the prestigious Roy W. Crum Award in 2021.

"Hani was a significant contributor to TRB and a respected member of the National Academy of Engineering and transportation research community. He touched the lives of many in the transportation sector and impacted the careers of countless individuals. He will be missed," said TRB Executive Director Victoria Sheehan.

TRB honors Mahmassani’s enduring legacy and celebrates a life dedicated to advancing transportation and improving lives through innovation, collaboration, and service.

In 2019, the American Intercity Bus Riders Association created the National Intercity Bus Atlas, a database of intercity bus transit services in the United States. The atlas was developed to facilitate the promotion of intercity bus use by providing comprehensive service provider, route, and scheduling information in a public-facing online platform. Before this, there had been no publicly available national clearinghouse, list, or map of intercity bus services.

NCHRP Research Report 1150: Implementation of the National Intercity Bus Atlas was released this week from TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program. It documents the development of the data framework for the mapping. Technical challenges and hesitancy by some private carriers to share certain operating data resulted in several key information gaps. The report offers suggested future improvements to the atlas such as including more service characteristics and strategies to address data collection challenges.

When it comes to thinking about technology, airport customers and operators alike think a lot about parking, which is usually the largest source of non-aeronautical revenue at commercial airports. In a survey released earlier this year from TRB's Airport Cooperative Research Program, in ACRP Synthesis 140: Airport Parking Reservation Systems and Techniques, a key finding was that airports employ a variety of online booking systems (OBS). Most airports surveyed said OBS improves the customer experience, provides future demand data, improves utilization, and helps obtain customer data. Operators were found to either use a parking-operations contract that includes OBS or to contract and manage OBS themselves.

For much more across all modes, take a look at the new National Academies Press Transformational Technology in Transportation Collection.

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U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy discussed air traffic controller staffing during a hearing of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week. In their media coverage of the hearing, NPR and Reuters cited the recent TRB/National Academies consensus report on the topic.