A Recap and Takeaways from TRB’s Annual Meeting

The Transportation Research Board's (TRB) Annual Meeting is consistently one of the most important events on the transportation community calendar. In its 102nd year, TRB hosted over 11,000 attendees and I was happy to be one of them this year in Washington D.C.

TRB is always a rewarding experience, but five days jam packed with activities can be exhausting. After many years of attending, I know to come equipped with my survival kit: a big cup of coffee, comfortable shoes, and a backpack full of essentials.

As co-organizer of the workshop/competition 3-Minute Thesis and the chair of the Safety and Operations Group Young Members Subcommittee (where I led an in-person meeting), I was kept busy during the conference. But in my free moments, I was thrilled to be there to support several other Iteris staff members who were able to present their works and lead activities (including Alican Karaer, PhD., who was a co-presenter on two research posters: Investigating the Probability of Potential Actions Performed by Drivers Experiencing Daytime Sun Glare–Induced Blindness and Detecting School Zones on Florida’s Public Roadways Using Aerial Images and Artificial Intelligence).

While at the meeting, I attended workshops, technical sessions, and committee meetings—with the workshops standing out to me the most. I started Sunday morning with the TSMO Data Exchanges Workshop then enjoyed the Sunday afternoon workshop, 3-Minute Thesis, which I had been helping to plan and organize over the past six months. This interactive workshop had two parts: first, a competition in which 24 attendees presented their research to a panel of judges, a winner and a runner up were identified by the judges as top two presenters, and an audience choice presenter was selected by the attendees. In the second part, there were presentations and an engaging Q&A discussion with the judges on how to communicate your technical work to a non-specialist audience (an important skill in this line of work). Additionally, on Sunday, I enjoyed the Digital Roadway Infrastructure Workshop—there were great discussions and workgroup breakouts to identify needs, opportunities, and actions to be undertaken to establish a national digital roadway strategy.

As always, TRB was a highly rewarding experience. I will be keeping my ears and eyes open for some of the keywords I heard most in my circles—such as digital infrastructure, data exchanges, transportation equity, deployment of connected and automated vehicle, electric vehicles, decarbonization—and I can’t wait to be back next year!