Transportation’s Disney World

If you have ever attended some of the sprawling conferences hosted by the trucking industry, you know that it’s difficult to see everything.

And when the conference’s program of scheduled events is a 372-page publication the size of a middle school textbook, it’s just about impossible. But that’s how much there was to see and hear at the 94th annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board.

About 12,000 people from around the world gathered Jan. 11-15 in Washington, D.C., for 750 sessions made up of 5,000 presentations on transportation. There were discussions of marine, air, highway and rail transportation — freight and passenger — not to mention bike lanes and pedestrian crosswalks.

On top of the panel discussions and task force meetings was an exhibit hall featuring all manner of transportation-related products.

Transport Topics staff covered the event at the Washington Convention Center in order to bring some of the experience to you.

“This is like Disney World for me. I love TRB,” said an official with the Tennessee DOT who came to talk about freight transportation as an economic-development tool.

Though not quite Disney — with people dressed as characters from animated movies — you have to admire the devotion of people like the professor who traveled from Israel to discuss his computer simulations of road pavement degradation over time.

Elsewhere, a standing-room-only crowd turned out for a panel on the buzz-worthy subject of automated vehicles. Discussion covered a commercially available system that moves driverless mining trucks around quarries in Australia to Google’s ongoing development of automated cars that could, in the company’s words, “transform mobility.”

But panelists said much is left to be done before driverless vehicles are more broadly available, with safety at the top of the list. In the case of both the mining trucks and Google’s tiny cars, multiple layers of safety systems are in place, but perfecting the technology for wider use will take some time, panelists said.

In another session, state DOT officials talked about the coordination that would be needed for connected cars and trucks to operate over long distances. Part of this includes plans for roadways that are not only durable but filled with communications nodes.

The Transportation Research Board is a part of the congressionally chartered National Academies, groups of scientists, engineers and researchers dedicated to transmitting and refining useful learning on public issues.