Transportation's backroom boys
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2008-01-09
It's probably the largest meeting of transportation's back room boys in the world - the U.S. Transportation Research Board's annual meeting. From the 13 - 17 of January 2008 three major hotels near downtown Washington D.C. will be taken over by as many as 7000 attendees from around the world - engineers, policymakers, corporate execs, researchers and a host of ancillary stakeholders.
These are the representatives of the 'boiler rooms' throughout North America and around the world which grind out the everyday decisions about transportation systems and produce the policies, products and partnerships that make these systems work.
High on the list of this year�s meeting will be road pricing (congestion taxes, tolls), new technologies to help transportation systems meet modern demands (especially electronic information technologies), and initiatives to address global climate change.
Undoubtedly, the pros and cons of public-private partnerships and the privatization of roads will also be widely discussed.
The broad perspective of the conference is illustrated by sessions on the problems of lost baggage at airports, school transportation, aging drivers and travel behavior.
The TRB is one of six major divisions of the National Research Council, which is, in turn, a division of The National Academies, an umbrella group which oversees also the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), The National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The Academy has a long history dating back to the incorporation of the NAS by Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
The TRB describes itself as a "private, nonprofit institution that is the principal operating agency of the National Academies in providing services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities."
The annual meeting, the 87th in its history, is being held at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel, the Hilton Washington hotel and the Omni Shoreham.
Late registrants can register at these hotels during the conference.
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