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The Trouble with TRB 2023
I have in the past been a fairly regularly attendee of TRB. Not so regular that I will ever get a 50-year attendee badge, or 30 years in a row, but pretty regular. Obviously COVID upset that. TRB remains the dominant conference in the transport field, certainly in the United States, but also globally. Not the most prestigious, but the best attended. The people who run TRB seem to try hard at the time of the conference, and pulling off a conference for more than 10,000 people is an obvious logistics challenge I personally would run to avoid the headaches of. Logistically it usually goes as well as expected. I would generally argue we should have more posters and fewer spoken presentations, because posters allow movement and discussion, and don’t trap us with a single paper for 20 minutes. But that is a matter of taste, and my sense is the audience of older than average federal government workers prefer to sit.
I first wrote about problems in 2007, and some things have changed in 15 years, the journal has been sold off to Sage (essentially). It is still not open access for some reason ($?). It still is not especially prestigious as a journal outlet. I followed up in 2009, noting that the journal still wasn’t free, and quality control was still questionable.
We are now entering 2023. The review process if anything has gotten worse. In my biased opinion, it is little better than a random number generator. (With some bias for famous people, probably). My name is associated with a statistically significant number of submitted articles each year. This year I had good (favorable) reviews on rejected papers and vice versa. I know committees have scarce slots and differing number of submissions, but the pretense this is objective should disappear.Some really good papers get rejected. Sometimes rejected papers are accepted the following year with little more than a title change. I understand the desire to spread the wealth (or increase the number of participants, and thus revenue), but then limit the presentations per attendee up front.
If randomness is the intended outcome, but there are a limited number of slots, perhaps we can replace the review process with a lottery, it would save a ton of work on everyone’s part.
Alternatively, how about any TRB member gets to present N (1-3) coauthored papers by default (N increases over time)— quality control is their personal reputation. They can sponsor M other papers (M increases with time as well), but they have their name publicly associated with it.
In theory all reviewers are doing is evaluating whether a paper is good enough to present (one criteria that would drag quality up is ensuring that accepted papers are better than the median paper from previous years), and whether, if the authors wanted it to be considered for publication in the Transportation Research Record, it should be further reviewed. Soon an AI will be trained that can make this determination at least as well as a TRB Reviewer. Then an AI will be trained to game that AI and generate nonsense papers that pass review. I have colleagues who argue this has already happened.
[And yes, I reviewed every paper I was asked to review, though the number has gone down this year compared to the past, probably people have forgotten about me because of COVID, I am not volunteering for me, and I do lots of review and editorial work already.]
In-Person Conferences
Speaking of conferences … Tis the season, all activity must be completed before mid-December. I will be at the following …
November 14-15 iMOVE Conference 2022
November 21 Australian Net Zero Conference
November 23 2022 Transport Research Association of New South Wales (TraNSW) Symposium
November 25 Micromobility Conference
December 2 TransportCamp Sydney
As well as
January 8-12, 2023 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting
Rankings
The annual-ish Ioannidis ranking of academics is out (Source data: https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/4).
“In the September 2022 data-update for “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators” by John Ioannidis (Stanford), career-long data are updated to end-of-2021 and single recent year data pertain to citations received during calendar year 2021.
The selection is based on the top 100,000 scientists by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above in the sub-field. There are 19,216 scientists whose primary field is in "Logistics & Transportation".”
Transport academic rankings can be found here. I did not put this together, obviously, and I am not sure how this is done, so I am a bit skeptical, but the University of Sydney comes out well, so we will take it and brag:
#1 David Hensher
#19 Mike Bell
#24 David Levinson
#163 John Rose
#198 Corinne Mulley [emirita]
#223 Michiel Bliemer
Congratulations to everyone on the list for being more academically productive in the transport sphere in a way that generates standardized citations as summarised by the unique equation in this analysis than everyone not on the list.
Jobs
The University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies is hiring a director for the Accessibility Observatory research program. [My old haunt, it’s a good group of people]. The position will lead research and outreach activities related to destination access, transport planning, and land-use planning. Details here: https://cts.umn.edu/about/jobs
Posts
Access and place improvements: The Grand Parade – Kyeemagh to Sans Souci [on WalkSydney blog]
Posts (for paying subscribers)
This monthly post is for all subscribers. As I am sure you are aware by now, I started a paid edition of the newsletter this month. It’s less than $0.14/day when billed on an annual basis (a bit over $1/article). There is also a free trial. Thanks to those who already subscribed.
In short, you will receive the full post if you choose to become a paid subscriber to the Transportist Newsletter. The free Monthly Edition will remain, I am targeting the paid Weekly edition to be on Tuesdays (Australia time) in the interim weeks. My hope is if enough of you sign up, I will be more motivated to write. And if writing has a deadline, more writing will occur.
My related hope is that if you do subscribe, you will value this more than if it is free, and be more likely to read it. Thus by charging, I am increasing total value (assuming what I write is more valuable than if you were to give your attention elsewhere). Note: I don’t expect to become rich, or give up my day job.
If you sign up, you will get immediate access to:
as well as what I write in the future.
Research by Others
Transit Costs Project: Understanding Transit Infrastructure Costs in American Cities — This is a hugely important report, with implications for New York City and other large US cities, most importantly, but the entire "Anglosphere", including the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where Public Transport construction costs are far higher than necessary.
Research
Urban Development Institute of Australia - New South Wales (2022) South West Sydney Rail Link Extension: An Accessibility-Oriented Case for City Shaping Infrastructure
This article summarises it. [There are other articles that are terrible]
News
Massive blast cripples parts of Crimea-Russia bridge, in blow to Putin’s war effort
The Slough of Disillusionment has hit AVs, with Ford and VW funded Argo wrapping up shop.
Still, not all is lost: IKEA teams with self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics to test deliveries in Texas
Feral camels, deadly crashes: Can Australia tame its remote Outback Way? [Beware of the dizzying background images]