Everyone interested is invited: A short history of TRB

This article is adapted from The Transportation Research Board, 1920–2020: Everyone Interested Is Invited, to be published by the National Academies Press in January 2020.

TRB can be best understood as an infrastructure—one that people purposely designed, carefully constructed, and devotedly maintained to share and strengthen knowledge about transportation.

The core missions and structures that underpin today’s TRB predate its birth. In 1863, Congress chartered the independent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to advise government upon request. NAS’s founders responded to their first federal requests by forming committees, setting the precedent that the expertise required to advise government is found not in the individual but in a group acting collectively.