Blake Thomas, Junior Associate at DIXON, had the opportunity to attend the 2025 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and recaps his experience below:

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Attending the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference in Washington, DC, this January was an absolute treat, and I would recommend it to anyone with a genuine interest in transportation.

Firstly, the sheer scale of the event was impressive. The conference had over 12,000 attendees and offered over 650 workshops and 4,000 presentations. I was often overwhelmed by the number of interesting sessions I could attend at any given moment. However, the variety of topics and formats kept things fresh and exciting, well into the fourth day of the conference.

My favorite event types were the workshops and the poster sessions. Workshops broke participants into smaller groups, allowing experts to facilitate engaging discussions that incorporated diverse perspectives. The nuances of each issue came to life with the open discussion, and new insights emerged as disciplines intersected. Meanwhile, poster sessions gave you the opportunity to peruse an immense variety of research and speak with academics one-on-one about their work. Both event types were fantastic opportunities to network and pick the brains of national experts.

While a variety of perspectives are represented, the conference leans academic, so expect to hear about cutting-edge research. Unsurprisingly, AI was the topic in vogue, with presentations on every sort of application you can imagine. The most interesting to me was the Oregon Department of Transportation’s effort to use machine learning on satellite imagery to create a complete bike network dataset for every town in the state. Another intriguing technology was virtual reality and its possible applications to community engagement and participatory research.  

Overall, few events offer a better opportunity to feel the pulse of the transportation industry than TRB. While the cost of attendance may be high, you are guaranteed to encounter ideas and perspectives you have never considered, and you will have a great time doing so.