By Timothy Cama, Staff Reporter This story appears in the Jan. 21 print edition of Transport Topics.
WASHINGTON — Don Osterberg, senior vice president of safety at truckload carrier Schneider National Inc., said transportation research needs to include components to help businesses and regulators make better use of the research.
Osterberg, who was appointed to a three-year term last week as a member of the Transportation Research Board’s executive committee, told Transport Topics that researchers need to help “bridge the gap” between research and implementation.
“Oftentimes, the research community says, ‘We do research, and the bridge to implementation is really out of scope,’ ” Osterberg said in an interview during TRB’s annual meeting here. “My view is that it absolutely ought to be in scope for researchers to think about.”
He also encouraged trucking industry officials to participate in TRB, which promotes and facilitates transportation research and hosts a major conference annually in Washington.
Industry participation is “the third leg of a three-legged stool. You’ve got your researchers, you’ve got your regulators and then you’ve got your practitioners,” Osterberg said. “I think we’re a little bit short on the third leg.”
Increasing participation among industry representatives, who Osterberg said could be considered “practitioners” of what researchers at TRB’s meeting study, would likely bring the research closer to implementation by bringing a decision-making perspective to it, he said.
“I believe that researchers need to understand how decision-makers make decisions that we’ll actually implement,” he said. “They think of that as being outside their domain, and I think we need to try to reframe that.”
TRB’s executive committee includes academic representatives, state and location transportation leaders and those who work in the transportation industry, and it oversees the group’s activities. Its members are appointed by the chairman of the National Research Council, an independent advisory agency of which TRB is a part.
Osterberg was one of three representatives of the freight industry to be named to the committee. Deborah Butler, executive vice president of planning at freight railroad Norfolk Southern Corp., will be the committee’s chairwoman for the next year, and Steven Palmer, vice president of transportation for home-improvement retailer Lowe’s Cos. Inc., started a three-year term as an executive committee member.
Comparing this year with previous TRB annual meetings, Osterberg said he saw “subtle variations of the same research that was being done years ago” in many areas of trucking safety, such as the use of safety technologies, obstructive sleep apnea and substance abuse.
“I’m all for thinking great and visionary thoughts. But at some point, there’s got to be a path to implementation,” he said.
Osterberg did not speak at any of the sessions at this year’s TRB meeting, he said. But he attended a variety of safety-related sessions, including one that presented analysis about obstructive sleep apnea among truck drivers, in which two of the researchers used data from Schneider drivers.
