TTI Participates in TRB’s 100th Annual Meeting — Virtual for the First Time

The Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) was well represented at the 100th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Jan. 5–29. This was the first time in its history TRB has held the event virtually.

The meeting program included more than 3,000 presentations addressing 350 sessions and workshops on topics aimed at policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers and government representatives in the public and private sectors. More than 130 TTI employees participated in the meeting, 80 of whom were presenters on various transportation topics. The meeting spotlighted the theme Launching a New Century of Mobility and Quality of Life and featured dozens of sessions on COVID-19’s impact on transportation, as well as how transportation professionals and researchers are responding to the pandemic.

“A virtual annual meeting certainly wasn’t what TRB had in mind for its 100th anniversary, but TRB leadership and staff did an outstanding job in this new space to offer the quality sessions that TRB participants are accustomed to,” says TTI Executive Associate Director Katie Turnbull, a member of the TRB Executive Committee. “Participation in committee meetings, lectern sessions and poster sessions was vibrant, with a record number of close to 20,000 people attending.”

Although this year’s conference did not allow TTI’s participants to physically network with one another, the Institute’s virtual exhibit hall was a perfect spot to leave behind a business card or stop and greet transportation professionals around the world. Designed to inform visitors about the Institute, TTI’s booth was complimented by multiple visitors for its interactive features. Visitors could navigate to the main TTI website, search for job opportunities, read the latest Texas Transportation Researcher magazine, and subscribe to TTI’s new podcast.

TTI Researchers Srinivas Geedipally, Dominique Lord, Michael Pratt, Kay Fitzpatrick and Eun Sug Park were awarded the Safety Performance and Analysis Committee’s 2021 Best Paper Award for their paper “Safety Performance of One-Way Arterials.”

“This paper is based on a project sponsored by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program,” said Geedipally. “Prior to this study, safety prediction procedures for assessing the performance of one-way arterials were not available. Safety data collected in California, Illinois, Michigan, Oregon and Texas were used to calibrate predictive models, each of which included a safety performance function and several crash modification factors. The study results can be used to estimate the expected crash frequency of one-way arterials and to understand the differences in the safety performance when a two-way street is converted to a one-way operation or vice versa. The models developed in this study will be included in the second edition of the Highway Safety Manual.”