Oversight Activities

The Executive Office supports the work of the TRB Executive Committee, which provides policy direction to TRB programs and activities within the overall policies of the National Academies. Oversight of committee and panel appointments and of report review is the responsibility of the Executive Committee’s Subcommittee for NRC Oversight (SNO), which ensures that TRB meets institutional standards and that its activities are appropriate for the National Academies. As part of its oversight function, the subcommittee monitors the Board’s progress in expanding the representation of minorities and women on TRB committees and panels. 

C. Michael Walton, TRB Division Chair for NRC Oversight, heads this subcommittee and represents TRB as an ex officio member on the NRC Governing Board. Henry G. (Gerry) Schwartz, Jr., serves as the SNO Vice Chair, a post established in 2006, with oversight responsibilities for the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2).  The Executive Office processes the Board’s large volume of committee and panel appointments and maintains committee membership records. A hallmark of the National Academies is its institutional process to ensure the independent, rigorous review of reports. In maintaining these high standards, TRB follows guidelines approved by the NRC that carefully match the review criteria and procedures to the type of report.

Publications 

To fulfill one of its oldest missions, TRB disseminates transportation research results and technology information through an extensive array of timely publications.  The Board has gained national and international prominence for its books and reports assessing the state of the art or practice in specific areas of transportation, presenting the results of transportation research, addressing major national transportation policy issues, and identifying research needs. TRB continues to expand its publishing effort by releasing a growing number of titles electronically, some exclusively in electronic format.  TRB books and reports span the range of transportation functions, disciplines, and modes. The TRB Publications Office produces titles in the following series:

• Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board gathers technical papers that have been accepted for publication through a rigorous peer review process refereed by TRB technical committees. In 2008, the Board published 49 volumes of the journal, containing 702 papers grouped by subject. TRR Online, inaugurated last year, is an online subscription and pay-per-view service for the Transportation Research Record series.  Record papers are posted simultaneously with the release of each printed volume to a searchable, password-protected section of the TRB website, which also includes all journal papers published since 1996.1 The TRR Online system now provides access to approximately 9,000 papers that have been published in the Record series since 1996. The service allows all visitors to identify papers of interest and to review abstracts of those papers. Access to the full papers is available to service subscribers and employees of TRB sponsors and on a pay-perview basis to the general public.
• The bimonthly magazine TR News features timely articles on innovative and state-of-the-art research and practice in all modes of transportation. News items of interest to the transportation community, profiles of transportation professionals, book and journal summaries, meeting announcements, and highlights of TRB activities also are included.  Features this year included articles on a pioneering photolog of Connecticut’s roadways; lessons and initiatives from domestic and international scanning tours; a history linking the Good Roads Movement with the rise of rural free delivery of the mail; the communications and collaboration contributing to the success of the massive Marquette Interchange reconstruction in Milwaukee; and the prospects and necessary transformations to develop a sustainable transportation system. The July–August issue of the magazine focused on transportation education and training. Selected features of TR News are posted on the TRB website, and the full issue is made accessible on the web on a fourmonth delay.
• Special Reports contain the results of TRB policy studies on issues of national importance in transportation.  These studies, many conducted at the request of federal agencies or of Congress, focus on a variety of complex, often controversial, topics.  Special reports published in 2008 included Potential Impacts of Climate Change on U.S. Transportation; Great Lakes Shipping, Trade, and Aquatic Invasive Species; Risk of Vessel Accidents and Spills in the Aleutian Islands: Designing a Comprehensive Risk Assessment; The Role of Transit in Emergency Evacuation; and The Federal Investment in Highway Research, 2006–2009: Strengths and Weaknesses. All current and selected out-of-print special reports are posted on the Board’s website.
• Conference Proceedings assemble formal papers, presentations, and summaries of discussions from TRB conferences and workshops. Freight Demand Modeling: Tools for Public-Sector Decision Making; Interagency–Aviation Industry Collaboration on Planning for Pandemic Outbreaks; Innovations in Travel Demand Modeling, Volumes 1 and 2; and Key Issues in Transportation Programming were published this year and posted on the web.
• Transportation Research E-Circulars collect research problem statements, reports, and technical information from the work of TRB technical activities committees. Topics of Circulars published this year included the evolving role of statewide transportation planning in an era of regional funding and governance, implementation of an airport pavement management system, surface transportation weather and snow and ice control technologies (more than 50 technical papers), bridge and structure management (more than 30 technical papers), and geophysical methods for geotechnical site characterization. Circulars are available exclusively in electronic format on the TRB website.
• Miscellaneous Reports include special publications, such as the Highway Capacity Manual 2000 and the Access Management Manual. The Highway Capacity Manual 2000 was last updated in 2005 to incorporate corrections and changes as of July 2005 into the two print versions—one for U.S. customary measures and one for metric—and the CD-ROM.