Now available to order from the TRB Bookstore, the Highway Capacity Manual, Sixth Edition: A Guide for Multimodal Mobility Analysis (HCM) provides methods for quantifying highway capacity. In its current form, it serves as a fundamental reference on concepts, performance measures, and analysis techniques for evaluating the multimodal operation of streets, highways, freeways, and off-street pathways. The Sixth Edition incorporates the latest research on highway capacity, quality of service, Active Traffic...

TRB’s Conference Proceedings on the Web 24: Challenges to Implementing Successful Land Use Strategies at Airports is a compilation of the presentations and a summary of the ensuing discussions at an ACRP Insight Event held April 10-11, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The event brought together airport representatives and community planners to discuss effective strategies for improving their ability to partner on land use issues in the vicinity of airports. ACRP Insight Events convene airport industry leaders a...

TRB’s Conference Proceedings on the Web 24: Challenges to Implementing Successful Land Use Strategies at Airports is a compilation of the presentations and a summary of the ensuing discussions at an ACRP Insight Event held April 10-11, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The event brought together airport representatives and community planners to discuss effective strategies for improving their ability to partner on land use issues in the vicinity of airports. ACRP Insight Events convene airport industry leaders a...

Global business and tourism depend heavily on the efficient operation of airports and movement of passengers, baggage, and cargo across many areas. With increasing demand and connectivity requirements for airports comes the need for more sophisticated simulation and modeling tools to validate design assumptions. Furthermore, airport design and planning decisions have significant impacts on policy and major capital improvement decisions, which can be supported by simulation and modeling tools at many leve...

Hello Internet! In This Episode: Erin and Weer’d talk about the ammo and gun shortage in reaction to COVID-19, as well as an innovative strategy for keeping people working and happy; David tells us how to swage your own bullets; … Continue reading →

Fostering Multimodal Connectivity Newsletter for April 2020 , released by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration

The Trump administration has continued to weaken air pollution regulations despite warnings that long-term exposure to dirty air relates to higher COVID-19 death rates. Harvard researchers made the first statistical link between the two last month, just before the administration loosened some clean air regulations and failed to tighten others.

TRB has been closely monitoring the evolving situation related to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak. The health and safety of our volunteers, sponsors, meeting guests, staff, and the greater community are of utmost importance to us. In light of the current situation, we have decided that the event cannot be held as scheduled. Convened by Transportation Research Board, the Sustainability and Emerging Transportation Technology (SETT) Conference was to be held on August 31 – September 2, 2020, at ...

If Bryan Fuller had stayed with Star Trek: Discovery, his vision for a Mirror Universe wouldn’t have been like the type shown...

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Research Report 163: Guidebook for Preparing and Using Airport Design Day Flight Schedules explores the preparation and use of airport design day flight schedules (DDFS) for operations, planning, and development. The guidebook is geared towards airport leaders to help provide an understanding of DDFS and their uses, and provides detailed information for airport staff and consultants on how to prepare one.

Global business and tourism depend heavily on the efficient operation of airports and movement of passengers, baggage, and cargo across many areas. With increasing demand and connectivity requirements for airports comes the need for more sophisticated simulation and modeling tools to validate design assumptions. Furthermore, airport design and planning decisions have significant impacts on policy and major capital improvement decisions, which can be supported by simulation and modeling tools at many leve...

Pletení, to přece není práce pro chlapa, řeknete si. Ovšem ve slovenských Čičmanech (a vůbec v celé oblasti Horního Pováží) by mnozí nesouhlasili. Tady bývalo pletení ponožek z ovčí vlny výsostnou činností tamních bačů. V dnešní době je ovšem takový pletač nadmíru vzácný.

V posledních týdnech se aktivně zapojuji do snah získat podporu pro kreativní průmysly, zasažené koronakrizí. Mailů a diskuzních příspěvků, u nichž mám pocit, že jsou citací z legendárního projevu Miloše Jakeše na Červeném Hrádku, mám plnou schránku.

Ve věku 87 let dnes zemřel jeden z otců zakladatelů rock´n´rollu Little Richard (vlastním jménem Richard Wayne Penniman). S odvoláním na jeho syna to na svém webu napsal časopis Rolling Stone. Příčina smrti zpěváka a klavíristy z amerického státu Georgia zatím není známá.

Upcoming History/Royalty There are no applications to process at this time. Finished History/Royalty There are no finished forms to process at this time. Moved History/Royalty Pirates (People: Groups) Closed History/Royalty (Open for application) There are no closed forms to process at this time. Troubled History/Royalty(Not open for application) The following fanlisting is scheduled for removal […]

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Initially, the new season was slated to premiere Wednesday, June 17.

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If Bernie Sanders wants to say that Fidel Castro occasionally did something good, while acknowledging that he often did things that were very bad, I think that’s a reasonable position. (It might also be reasonable to say that Adolf Hitler occasionally did something good, though offhand I can’t think of a good example.) But surely […]

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A couple of months ago, a records request revealed a private surveillance contractor had access to nearly every piece of surveillance equipment owned and operated by the state of Utah. Banjo was the company with its pens in all of the state's ink. Banjo's algorithm ran on top of Utah's surveillance gear: CCTV systems, 911 services, location data for government vehicles, and thousands of traffic cameras.

All of this was run through Banjo's servers, which are conveniently located in Utah government buildings. Banjo's offering is of the predictive policing variety. The CEO claims its software can "find crime" without any collateral damage to privacy. This claim is based on the "anonymization" of harvested data -- a term that is essentially meaningless once enough data is collected.

This partnership is now on the rocks, thanks to an investigation by Matt Stroud and OneZero. Banjo's CEO, Damien Patton, apparently spent a lot of his formative years hanging around with white supremacists while committing crimes.

In grand jury testimony that ultimately led to the conviction of two of his associates, Patton revealed that, as a 17-year-old, he was involved with the Dixie Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. On the evening of June 9, 1990 — a month before Patton turned 18 — Patton and a Klan leader took a semi-automatic TEC-9 pistol and drove to a synagogue in a Nashville suburb. With Patton at the wheel, the Ku Klux Klan member fired onto the synagogue, destroying a street-facing window and spraying bullets and shattered glass near the building’s administrative offices, which were next to that of the congregation’s rabbi. No one was struck or killed in the shooting. Afterward, Patton hid on the grounds of a white supremacist paramilitary training camp under construction before fleeing the state with the help of a second Klan member.

If you're wondering where the state of Utah's due diligence is in all of this, there's a partial explanation for this lapse: the feds, who brought Patton in, screwed up on their paperwork.

Because Patton’s name was misspelled in the initial affidavit of probable cause filed in Brown’s case — an FBI agent apparently spelled Damien with an “o” rather than an “e” — any search of a federal criminal court database for “Damien Patton” would not have surfaced the affidavit.

Now that his past has been exposed, the state of Utah has announced it won't be working with Banjo.

The Utah attorney general’s office will suspend use of a massive surveillance system after a news report showed that the founder of the company behind the effort was once an active participant in a white supremacist group and was involved in the shooting of a synagogue.

The AG's office can only shut down so much of Banjo's surveillance software. Other government agencies not directly controlled by the state AG are making their own judgment calls. The University of Utah is suspending its contract with Banjo, but the state's Department of Public Safety has only gone so far as to "launch a review" of its partnership with the company. City agencies and a number of police departments who have contracts with Banjo have yet to state whether they will be terminating theirs.

And the AG's reaction isn't a ban. The office appears to believe it might be able to work through this.

“While we believe Mr. Patton’s remorse is sincere and believe people can change, we feel it’s best to suspend use of Banjo technology by the Utah attorney general’s office while we implement a third-party audit and advisory committee to address issues like data privacy and possible bias,” Piatt said. “We recommend other state agencies do the same.”

It's refreshing to hear a prosecutor state that it's possible for former criminals to turn their lives around and become positive additions to their communities, but one gets the feeling this sort of forgiveness is only extended to ex-cons who have something to offer law enforcement agencies. Everyone else is just their rap sheet for forever, no matter how many years it's been since their last arrest.

The other problem here is the DA's office's tacit admission it did not take data privacy or possible bias into account before granting Banjo access to the state's surveillance equipment, allowing it to set up servers in government buildings, and giving it free rein to dust everything with its unaudited AI pixie dust.

These are all steps that should have taken place before any of this was implemented, even if the state had chosen to do business with a company with a less controversial CEO. This immediate reaction is the right step to take, but a little proactivity now and then would be a welcome change.

A few weeks ago, the US telecom industry began pushing a bullshit narrative through its usual allies. In short, the claim revolves around the argument that the only reason the US internet still works during a pandemic was because the Trump FCC ignored the public, ignored most objective experts, and gutted itself at the behest of telecom industry lobbyists. The argument first popped up over at AEI, then the Trump FCC, then the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and has since been seen in numerous op-eds nationwide. I'd wager that's not a coincidence, and I'd also wager we'll be seeing a lot more of them.

All of the pieces try to argue that the only reason the US internet works during a pandemic is because the FCC gutted its authority over telecom as part of its "restoring internet freedom" net neutrality repeal. This repeal, the story goes, drove significant investment in US broadband networks (not remotely true), resulting in telecom Utopia (also not true). The argument also posits that in Europe, where regulators have generally taken a more active role in policing things like industry consolidation and telecom monopolies, the internet all but fell apart (guess what: not true).

Usually, like in this op-ed, there's ample insistence that the US broadband sector is largely wonderful while the EU has gone to hell:

"Unlike here, European networks are more heavily regulated. This has led to less investment and worse performance for consumers for years. American consumers are being generally well served by the private sector."

Anybody who has spent five minutes talking to Comcast customer support -- or tried to get scandal-plagued ISP like Frontier Communications to upgrade rotten DSL lines -- knows this is bullshit. Still, we penned a lengthy post exploring just how full of shit this argument is, and how there's absolutely zero supporting evidence for the claims. The entire house of cards is built on fluff and nonsense, and it's just ethically grotesque to use a disaster to help justify regulatory capture and market failure.

While it's true that the US internet, in general, has held up relatively well during a pandemic, the same can't be said of the so called "last mile," or the link from your ISP's network to your home. Yes, the core internet and most primary transit routes, designed to handle massive capacity spikes during events like the Superbowl, has handled the load relatively well. The problem, as Sascha Meinrath correctly notes here, is sluggish speeds on consumer and business lines that, for many, haven't been upgraded in years:

"Right now, an international consortium of network scientists is collecting 750,000 U.S. broadband speed tests from internet service provider (ISP) customers each day, and we’ve been tracking a stunning loss of connectivity speeds to people’s homes. According to most ISPs, the core network is handling the extra load. But our data show that the last-mile network infrastructure appears to be falling down on the job."

Again, your 5 Mbps DSL line might be ok during normal times, but it's not going to serve you well during a pandemic when your entire family is streaming 4K videos, gaming, and Zooming. And your DSL line isn't upgraded because there's (1) very little competition forcing your ISP to do so, and (2) the US government is filled to the brim with sycophants who prioritize campaign contributions and ISP revenues over the health of the market and consumer welfare. And while there's a contingency of industry-linked folks who try very hard to pretend otherwise, this is a policy failure that's directly tied to mindless deregulation, a lack of competition, and, more importantly, corruption. In short, the complete opposite of the industry's latest talking point.

For years we've been noting how US telcos have refused to repair or upgrade aging DSL lines because it's not profitable enough, quickly enough for Wall Street's liking. Facing no competition and no regulatory oversight, there's zero incentive for a giant US broadband provider to try very hard. Similarly, because our lawmakers and regulators are largely of the captured, revolving door variety, they rubber stamp shitty mergers, turn a blind eye to very obvious industry problems, routinely throwing billions in taxpayer money at monopolies in exchange for fiber networks that are usually only partially deployed -- if they're deployed at all.

Meanwhile, US telcos that have all but given up on upgrading aging DSL lines have helped cement an even bigger Comcast monopoly across vast swaths of America. It's a problem that the telecom sector, Trump FCC, and various industry apologists will ignore to almost comical effect. Also ignored is the fact that this results in US broadband subscribers paying some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world:

"Numerous studies, including those conducted by the FCC itself, show that broadband pricing is the second-largest barrier to broadband adoption (availability is the first). It’s obvious that if people are being charged a lot for a service, they’re less likely to purchase it. And independent researchers have already documented that poor areas often pay more than rich communities for connectivity. Redlining of minority and rural areas appears to be widespread, and we need accurate pricing data from the FCC to meaningfully address these disparities."

Try to find any instance where Ajit Pai, or anybody in this chorus of telecom monopoly apologists, actually admits that the US broadband market isn't competitive and, as a result, is hugely expensive for businesses and consumers alike. You simply won't find it. What you will find are a lot of excuses and straw men arguments like this latest one, designed to distract the press, public, and policymakers from very obvious market failure. Market failure that was a major problem in normal times, and exponentially more so during a pandemic where broadband is an essential lifeline.