TRB Travel Forecasting Committee Chair

As chair of the TRB Standing Committee on Travel Forecasting, UrbanLabs helped steer the committee toward a clearer and more contemporary understanding of what travel forecasting should support. The strategic plan from this period emphasized research quality and technology transfer, but it also pushed the committee to engage more directly with equity and justice, decision-making under uncertainty, induced demand, AI evaluation, statewide modeling, and integrated modeling.

The work also focused on improving how the committee functioned as a community: better communications, clearer volunteer pathways, more equitable paper review processes, and stronger alignment between research activity and real decision-making needs.

This experience is also important because it reflects a boundary. The public letter closing out the chair term explains that continued volunteer leadership no longer felt tenable because TRB no longer seemed like a trustworthy venue for open scientific exchange, including concerns about administrative filtering and censorship of scientific work. Naming that limit is part of the UrbanLabs mission too: technology and institutions should serve learning, integrity, and people rather than ask for trust they have not earned.