Reflections on the History of the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering

I will now discuss the transportation-related topics covered in Transactions and Proceedings. In the early years of the ASCE, the technical topics were mostly design and construction of facilities and the papers were prepared with implementation in mind. They were presented in the form of reports and case studies, often without the formal citations or references we use today. Railroad and water transportation dominated the topics because they were the main modes of long-range freight and passenger transportation at that time. My sample of 613 papers between 1875 and 1922 indicated that 26% involved transportation facilities and included design types, materials, and construction of railroads, canals, and ports, as well as road pavements with the advent of the automobile age in early 1900s.

Papers on railroads dealt with alignments; cost elements; railways in Europe and South America; methods and costs of railroad surveys; the comparative economy of light and heavy rail; the cost of railway tie renewals; design and construction of inclines and elevated railroads; electrification of suburban railroads; reckoning of time in the operation of railways and other lines of communication; methods of railroad property valuation; underground railways; urban street rail traffic in New York, 1885–1904; railroad terminal and station design; federal ownership of railroads; and performance of railroads during World War I. A paper in 1892 highlighted efficiencies in the use of railways for freight transportation.

Throughout this period, there were many papers on railroad bridges covering structural aspects, materials, and costs. Some of the specific topics were case studies of bridges in different parts of the country, bridge types such as drawbridges versus upright arched bridges, bridge failures and repair methods, bridge inspection, life expectancy of iron railroad bridges, bridge-painting, operation of movable and ferry bridges, the economics of steel arch bridges, and comparison of bridges and tunnels for Hudson River crossings in New York City.

A paper in 1878 cautioned about the threats to navigation of the Mississippi River and the reclamation of its alluvial lands (Harrod 1878). In the late 19th century, papers on water transportation focused on improvement of entrances to ports and harbors, interoceanic ship canals and locks, and dock improvements. In 1898 there was a paper on the economic depth for canals of large traffic (Mayer 1898). A number of papers followed in the early 20th century on such topics as an alternative line for the Nicaragua Canal, the Panama Canal, the Dalles-Celilo Canal, and the Cape Cod Canal. An early example of the awareness of environmental impacts was a 1908 paper that discussed the relationship between forests and reservoirs and the streamflow of navigable rivers (Chittenden 1909).

The topic of roads first appeared in the database for the year 1892 in a paper on disputed points in road building. There were only 10 papers on roads and highways in a sample of 613 over about half a century, most appearing between 1915 and 1922. They were primarily descriptions of road types in specific counties, the use of asphalt and concrete as road-building materials, and efforts to plan and execute statewide networks in states such as Colorado and California. A paper in 1906 compared street traffic in New York City between 1805 and 1904, and a paper in 1909 dealt with vertical passenger transportation using elevators (Bolton 1909). Although rail transit dominated both inter- and intraurban passenger transportation, the affordability of automobiles by middle-class Americans in the early 20th century permanently changed the transportation landscape of the country. Consequently, while provision of better roads was a major concern for local and state governments over the entire history of the Society, the need for all-weather highway transportation became a national priority particularly during the early decades of the past century.

Road-related papers included materials, construction methods, maintenance, and contracting procedures. A paper in 1918 described experiments on asphalt pavements in various cities in Texas. A paper in 1914 investigated the use of sand-clay mixtures in road surfacing (Koch 1914). Soon there were papers describing materials, design procedures, and construction methods for roads and highways.

After reaching its peak demand during World War II, urban public transportation ridership began to decline in parallel with massive suburbanization and attendant highway construction programs around the country. Topics of papers closely followed the changing landscape of transportation needs.

In 1956 the ASCE started to publish separate journals focusing on specific technical divisions. The motivation for the change was “to deliver technical data direct from authors to readers with the greatest possible speed.” The first issue of the Journal of the Highway Division (JHD) was published in January 1956. Because there was much activity in the US civil engineering community surrounding an impending federal highway program, as the funding source was being debated in the Congress, meetings and symposia were being organized by the ASCE to focus on various highway engineering–related issues. Many journal papers came out of these events.

With the passing of the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956 authorizing the construction of interstate highways, highway planning, design, and construction accelerated. Passenger rail transportation became almost nonexistent and was taken over by quasi-public agencies. Freight rail transportation went through a series of private-sector mergers and reconsolidations. In 1967 the US Department of Transportation was established with a set of modal administrations under its supervision, and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) replaced the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) of the Department of the Interior as the agency overseeing federal involvement in highway development. The BPR had not only been responsible for setting standards for design and construction of federal-aid highways but had also guided the development of tools and techniques of urban transportation planning. Many of the papers and technical reports published in Proceedings and subsequent journals had been authored by BPR personnel. The BPR had several predecessor organizations, starting with the Office of Road Inquiry established in 1893.

Since the late 1960s, the FHWA and the Urban Mass Transportation Administration [UMTA, later renamed as the Federal Transit Administration (FTA)] were the two major federal agencies involved in coordinating countrywide surface transportation activities. Because of the massive undertaking of interstate construction throughout the country, the role of the FHWA was more prominent in the transportation sector than in the other modes. The UMTA also played an important role in transportation research through its program of University Centers of Excellence and thus contributed to the production of many papers. Soon states also started to reorganize their highway agencies into multimodal transportation agencies, as different federal modal administrations began to develop programs for state and local agencies. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1970, along with other environmental and related federal legislation, transformed the way we plan, design, and build transportation facilities. The topics of technical papers published at the time reflected these developments.

In its first year, the JHD published several papers on control of highway access, including the economic effects of the Gulf Freeway in Houston, Texas, access control legislation in Indiana, implementation in Los Angeles, and an assessment of user benefits from access control in California. There were also papers on manpower requirements and on the education and training needed to meet the growing demands of highway engineering. This period witnessed the beginning of a massive highway construction program, and JHD articles reflected various aspects of it, including planning and research. The AASHO Road Test was the most significant research effort ever conceived up to that time to develop data-based methodologies for pavement design to replace prevailing practices using rules of thumb based on experience. Many papers came out of this effort. Along with pavement design, construction, and maintenance, geometric and drainage design was also prominent.

The Highway Act of 1962 created the need for comprehensive, coordinated, and continuous (3-C) planning. The role of public transit in metropolitan transportation planning was brought to the fore. JHD papers during the second half of the 1960s included topics such as travel survey methods to generate travel data for calibrating urban-transportation planning models, estimating trip production and attractions, distributing interzonal trips, allocating trips to street networks, and forecasting urban land uses. At the same time, road safety and traffic operations were becoming prominent paper topics. In the September 1959 issue, the journal had only two papers. One was on a plan for a county motor vehicle system, and the other was on pavement design in Virginia. However, a lengthy committee report was included on the use of electronic computers in highway engineering. Another detailed report was published in the January and March 1960 issues. It was prepared by the Committee on Highway Research, with chapters authored by K. B. Woods (soils, foundations, testing, and frost actions), F. N. Hveem (design, construction, and materials), E. L. Armstrong (planning, cost allocation, economic impacts, and safety), F. Burggraff (test roads), and J. Leisch (traffic and geometric design). These individuals were stalwarts in their field. There was also a review of the Federal Aid Highway Program of 1956 in the March issue.

The last few years of the JHD were increasingly devoted to planning, economics, safety, and traffic operations. This trend clearly reflected the changing requirements of federal aid programs. Much emphasis was placed on long-range planning using systematic and quantitative approaches for estimating current travel needs and forecasting future demands. The final two issues of the JHD were published in June and November 1968 and included 12 papers. Six were on various aspects of pavement design and construction and committee reports on highway research and urban transportation. Six other papers dealt with, respectively, highway geometric design, road alignment, highway speed characteristics, safety of roadside elements, construction staging, and the use of freeways for bus transit. One paper, on an innovative experiment started by a private bus company in Milwaukee to provide suburb-to-downtown service, received an enthusiastic response.

Separate journals of the ASCE’s transportation-related divisions were merged into one, with the first issue published in February 1969. According to a statement from the ASCE Board Committee on Publications, the objective was to have one publication where all papers in the broad area of transportation, generated by all sources within the Society, could be included. Its publication was to be quarterly, as opposed to irregular as for previous separate transportation journals.

In the first issue there were 14 technical papers and one committee report. Five of the papers were on urban transit, respectively involving air-cushion vehicles, gravity-vacuum systems, power supply for the BART system, conceptual design of underground rapid transit, and computer simulation of transit operations and costs. Three technical papers and the committee report were on airport design criteria and highway-airport design. One paper advocated the use of V/STOL aircraft as a way to minimize airport ground-access problems. There were papers on planning issues such as municipal matters, aesthetics of urban transportation facilities, the need for broadening the scope of civil engineering to tackle changing urban transportation technology, and the role of the private sector in public projects. Increasingly, urban transportation issues were dominating technical papers, reflecting federal and state investments in transit and public takeovers of private operations. During the next several years, urban and statewide transportation planning, including traffic estimation and forecasting, urban transit systems, and traffic operations and safety, became major themes.

I went through 139 papers from this period and found, 16 (12%) were on highway and airfield pavement design and materials; 23 (17%), on urban transit systems; 27 (19%), on transportation planning; 25 (18%), on traffic operations, construction and maintenance cost estimation, traffic safety, and related issues; 17 (12%), on airport planning and design; and 16 (12%), on various aspects of pipelines; the rest dealt with computer technology and traffic and transportation research. By the end of the 1960s, residents of many urban areas had started to question the impact of urban development and the role of transportation planning in serving the needs of low-income and other vulnerable groups. One 1970 paper highlighted social considerations of urban transportation; a paper in 1972 described the experience of San Francisco with citizen opposition to freeway plans. How urban highway planning was changing was described in a 1971 technical committee report (Low 1971), and how public attitudes toward urban transportation were surveyed in Minneapolis was presented in a 1970 paper. In later years, there were many papers on the impacts of freeways in urban areas, both positive and negative, involving land values, air quality, noise, safety, congestion, and the like.

The change in journal title as well as my direct involvement with the journal had an interesting beginning. They were both accidental but intertwined. In November 1982, Dave Dressia, ASCE Publications Manager at that time, came to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Urban Transportation Division to inform us that the Board Committee on Publications had decided to change the journal title from Transportation Engineering Journal of ASCE to Journal of Transportation and Pipeline Engineering. The objective was to highlight the role of pipelines in civil engineering. The Board of Direction had already approved the initiative, and all necessary arrangements for the title change were in place. As the chair of the Executive Committee of the Urban Transportation Division at that time, I felt the impending change was not appropriate, not for the reason that pipelines were not an important mode of transportation of certain commodities but for the reason that highlighting one mode over others would diminish the appeal of the journal. It took some effort to have the decision reversed by the Board of Direction. The journal title did not include any of the transportation modes, and it became simply the Journal of Transportation Engineering in January 1983. Started as a bimonthly, it soon became a monthly publication.

Although I had been on the publications committee of the Urban Transportation Division as the executive committee contact since 1978, I did not have any reason to be actively involved in the administration of the journal before the title change. The change made it clear that the journal suffered from a lack of ownership because it was the only ASCE journal that involved multiple technical divisions from separate management groups. This situation created a fragmented responsibility for the constituent divisions with no uniform editorial policy. Nor was there any clear mechanism of coordination among the separate divisional publication committees. I decided to engage, starting my long journey with the JTE that ended when I handed over the duties of editor-in-chief to Chris Hendrickson at the end of 2007. By that time, the Transportation and Development Institute had been formed and its Board of Governors had invited me to be editor-in-chief emeritus so as to continue my association with the journal in an advisory role.

I will now briefly look into the journal’s publication in its first period, between 1983 (Volume 109) and 1990 (Volume 115). During these eight years, the JTE had 48 issues comprising 370 papers, with about 7 to 8 papers per issue on average. Seventy-two (19%) were related to pavement design, materials, and construction, although several pavement management papers appeared as well. There were 51 (14%) pipeline-related papers and 59 (16%) on traffic operations, including freeway route guidance, network modeling, and signal controls. Planning and economics, including financing, systems evaluation, and freight, were the subjects of 40 (11%) papers, and urban transit operations and systems design were the subjects of 24 (6%). Environmental issues, including energy, were the topic of 20 (5%) papers; railroad, 13 (4%); air transportation, 14 (4%); highway geometric design, 11 (3%); and pedestrian and traffic safety, 22 (6%) papers. Papers dealing with transportation infrastructure systems management focusing on optimal timing of maintenance and repair over a life cycle took up 18 (5%) papers. In the January 1987 issue, there was a paper on a four-year experiment to assess the feasibility of shared use of automobiles (Doherty et al. 1987). This was one of the first experimental research studies in the country on shared mobility. Toward the end of this period, in the July 1988 issue, there was a paper that examined the role of emerging communication and information technologies in transportation engineering. That paper was a prelude to an ASCE conference in February 1989 in San Diego in cooperation with the California Department of Transportation: the first International Conference on Applications of Advanced Technologies in Transportation Engineering. This was one of the early conferences involving researchers and practitioners working in this area. There were 20 JTE papers during the last two years of the period, including two special issues, discussing real-time traffic control, the use of microcomputers and expert systems in freeway work-zone traffic management, pavement inspection, intersection safety management, construction control, evacuation planning, and electronic display of transit schedules. Most of these papers were motivated by the 1989 conference.

Soon after 1990, a great surge in research and demonstration projects took place in the country, initially on automated surveillance, detection, and management of freeway incidents. In the 1990s, a multidisciplinary approach to the use of electronics, computer science, vehicle technology, and traffic engineering to create an intelligent transportation system became an important area of research and commercial activity around the world, which over the past few decades, as technologies rapidly advanced, has led to the current focus on connected and automated transportation systems. The field of transportation research and practice has thus dramatically changed and continues to be transformed by advancements in technology as well as the exponentially increasing use of social media.

One can see how important advanced technologies were to transportation engineers by looking at the papers published in the JTE in subsequent years. From the 1990s to the present, there have been papers on various uses of machine learning, computer-based routing and scheduling of transit systems, emergency response and evacuation systems, computer-aided roadway design, multimessage fiber-optic lane control signs, ground-penetrating radar systems in bridge deck condition evaluation, automated urban freeway policies, roadway electrification and automation, vehicular automation in automated transportation systems, automated pavement distress surveys, use of robots in road and bridge maintenance and cleaning of transit cars, advanced vehicle command and control, automated vehicle identification, computer-assisted routing of hazardous materials, dynamic and on-line traffic assignment, intelligent traffic signals, and so on.

One can also clearly see how, over the years, transportation research and applications closely followed continuously advancing technologies in data collection, integration, and analysis. While civil engineers are still responsible for planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation systems, technologies for accomplishing these tasks have changed. The JTE has been at the forefront of highlighting these technologies and hopefully will continue to be proactive in future years.

The last few decades have also seen papers on such topics as new approaches to highway and airport pavement design, construction and maintenance, geometrics, and safety, and on methods of transportation planning, programming, and systems evaluation, including assessment of impacts on economic development, congestion mitigation, safety, and the environment. Some followed from two major national research initiatives, the Strategic Highway Research Projects 1 and 2. While the first initiative was oriented primarily toward pavement design, materials, and maintenance, the second was focused on planning, policy, and safety. The USDOT program of the University Transportation Centers also greatly contributed to multimodal transportation research and implementation in the past two decades and thus generated many of the papers published in the JTE.

In recent years, there has been a decline in the number of air transportation papers and a fairly steady increase in railroad-papers dealing with increasingly sophisticated analysis of track geometry; rail, crosstie, and rolling stock condition assessment; railroad network planning; and the like. This increase reflects the increasingly global nature of the journal, as railroads are still a major mode of transportation in many countries, particularly China. In addition, as could be expected, there were papers on connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) transportation involving simulations of impacts, lane management with variable lane width to accommodate CAVs, the effect of autonomous vehicles on the performance of signalized intersections, and so on.

To determine the types of papers published during recent decades, I went through the JTE’s best paper awards (Hendrickson 2019), which were initiated in 1991 to recognize authors of outstanding papers that contribute to the state of transportation engineering knowledge and practice. Selection starts at the review stage, and at the end of the year papers receiving at least one award-quality designation are identified. Final selection is made by polling the members of the editorial board. The best papers are thus a snapshot of the overall trend in journal content, and they give us an idea of the collective intellectual contribution of the journal in that period.

Between 1991 and 2010, a total of 19 best papers were selected. Three were on airport design involving centralized hub-terminal airport geometric concepts optimizing walking distance, baggage, and extensions, and on new large aircraft gate requirements for shared space and stage construction. Pavements were the topic of five papers dealing with moisture transport in asphalt concrete; variable tire pressure to reduce flexible pavement distress; spectral frequency domain analysis of pavement serviceability data; nonlinear subgrade modulus use in AASHTO design; and wet-pavement hydroplaning risk modeling. Six papers, on highway geometrics and traffic operations, dealt with a three-dimensional model for assessing stop-controlled intersection sight distance; software design and standards for adaptive traffic signal control; single-point urban interchange performance; optimization of work zones on two-lane roads; and statistical assessment of pedestrian flow level of service under right turns on green. Transportation planning was the topic of two papers, one on the need for reassessing the traditional process and the other on deficiencies in travel forecasting methods to estimate mobile emissions. Two papers discussed freeway incidents, with one on the use of loop detectors and the other on modeling for prediction of incidents and delays. In addition, one paper investigated urban transit scheduling using a genetic algorithm.

Between 2011 and 2018, there were 11 best papers. Three of them were on traffic operations, dealing with travel time evaluation of new interchange designs, prediction of operating speed profiles at intersections, and modeling of driver yield behavior at unsignalized crosswalks. Two papers on geometrics dealt with safety performance on straight and curved segments, and an innovative roadside design curve of lateral clearance. Winter maintenance of porous asphalt pavements and imputation of missing pavement performance data were the topics of two papers. Nonmotorized traffic dealing with bicycle traffic assignment and bidirectional pedestrian-stream modeling with oblique intersecting angles were the topics of two others. The two remaining papers discussed life-cycle project evaluation under risk and uncertainty and reviewed transit-route network design problems.

While they may not exactly represent the distribution of specific topical themes published in the journal during the past three decades, the best papers do cover major aspects of transportation engineering. I was somewhat surprised, however, that none of them in recent years was on such topics as CAV transportation, shared mobility, and social media. A possible reason may be that these areas are still in the development stage and that much of the research is based on simulated environments because actual performance data are not readily available. Overall, one important observation is that most of the papers involved practical problems, indicating that the quality of an engineering paper does not depend simply on the elegance of its analytics but on how the analytics are used to solve a problem or improve current practice.

The number of papers submitted and the number of papers published in the journal have increased to a great extent in the past several decades. For example, during 1992–1998 the number of papers submitted was 988, with an average of 165 papers per year. The number of manuscripts published was, however, 492, with an average of 66 papers and 7 discussions per year. Compared with the earlier period, the number of papers submitted during the seven-year period of 2012–2019 was 3,983, with an average of 569 per year, and the number of papers published during the same period was 851, with an average of 122 per year. Recent numbers do not include the papers in Part B for the first two years of its publication since 2018.

As the acceptance rates have decreased, the impact factors have increased over the years. In 2018 the journal’s impact factor was 1.486 compared with 0.154 in 1997. While all engineering journals in general have experienced rising impact factors in the past several decades, a more than eightfold increase is remarkable. It should be mentioned, however, that transportation journals, for various reasons, have had historically lower impact factors across the board than other disciplines within civil engineering, as noted by McCuen (2001) and corroborated by more recent numbers. In any case, unlike in most areas of science, the usefulness of engineering journals cannot be measured entirely by impact factors because the main reason for engineering publications is to be of use to practitioners in solving a problem or devising a product, and not simply to generate further theoretical research.

Downloads, on the other hand, may better reflect the usefulness of engineering publications. The number of full-text downloads of JTE Part A papers was 50,000 in 2018 and 68,000 in 2019. In the first six months of 2020, full-text downloads exceeded 64,000. If one considers all downloads including abstracts, these numbers are as high as more than five times. I feel these numbers are impressive and clearly demonstrate the relevance of the journal.

Reader surveys during the first two decades to assess the usefulness of the journal to the profession indicated that a great majority of respondents found the journal useful in keeping them informed of advances in the transportation field. However, satisfaction was higher among academics than among practitioners. The practicing group, in general, expressed dissatisfaction with the apparent complexity of many papers and the emphasis on equations, notations, mathematics, and theoretical discourses. While the results of small-sample surveys cannot be used to generalize opinions, it is reasonable to believe that readability is an important factor in the usefulness of journal content.

What, then, can we learn from the history of the JTE and its predecessor forums that will give us some direction for the future? First, as expected, papers published in a given period reflect prevailing technical issues, societal context, and available technologies. Consequently, those in Proceedings and Transactions in the first several decades were entirely practice oriented and dealt primarily with design and construction of the bridges, railroads, street cars, and canals that were being built around that time. Construction and materials for roads and highways became an important topic in the 20th century, along with operation and maintenance of urban transit and other facilities. In the beginning period of the modal journals, the focus on design and construction continued, with occasional discourses on planning and economic aspects. In the last few decades, however, the emphasis has greatly shifted to planning and operational issues that involve theoretical concepts, mathematical modeling, and statistical tools that often tend to be too esoteric and theoretical. With the expanding horizon of transportation engineering encompassing multimodal systems, it is indeed necessary to look into new tools and techniques to guide investments and related decisions. As for the context in which transportation is considered, we can expect the trend of adopting new knowledge from other disciplines and embracing new technologies will continue. Analytical approaches will continue to incorporate advanced mathematical and statistical procedures.

Throughout the journal’s history, even though many papers dealt with previously visited problems over the years, they incorporated continually advancing analytical approaches and methodologies as new knowledge was garnered through research and development and as technologies advanced. Occasionally papers or committee reports looked forward and envisioned the future. At the same time, we realize that the role of publications has changed over time. What started as a forum to serve a relatively small group of mostly practicing civil engineers in New York and its vicinity in the late 19th century now serves a much larger community of transportation engineers and related professionals in the US and beyond. The scope of publications has also changed to a great extent, from an entire focus on practice to mostly a platform for disseminating research results. As we move to the future, however, we must make sure that the focus on practice does not get lost and that our technical communications do not become so obscure that their usefulness is only to other researchers, with little attention to the applicability of the results to practice. As expressed by Hendrickson and Rilett (2019), the test of a JTE paper is its value to transportation engineers, not the sophistication of its modeling or its analytical approach.

Reader participation, represented by the number of discussions, has declined sharply in recent years. One has the distinct impression from the early Proceedings that Society membership was highly engaged in technical activities and technical meetings, and subsequent discussions and publications represented a Society major function as a forum for members to both disseminate and learn from experiences and observations. Each paper was accompanied by discussions and correspondence that sometimes numbered 30 or more. Most of the papers were first presented at Society meetings and then published. This practice continued for a long time, gradually decreasing even as recently as in 1970s. Over the last five or so decades, most, if not all, journal papers, have been direct submissions. Consequently, reader participation is not as high as it used to be. One reason may be that there are many related journals now as well as much on-line information. Articles in a particular journal may not be as critical for specific information and thus does not perhaps require formal clarification. Also, most readers now are academic researchers and the time and effort needed to prepare a discussion may not be justified in terms of the credit one receives for authoring one. Nevertheless, we still receive occasional discussions in spite of their gradually declining numbers.

The role of practitioners has significantly changed over the life of the Society’s technical publications. In the early years, authors mostly came from the practice community, such as consulting or construction companies. Public agencies—for example, engineering departments of cities and counties, state highway agencies, the Bureau of Public Roads, and the Army Corps of Engineers—took part in subsequent decades. In the 1960s and 1970s, regional planning agencies were active in contributing technical publications in planning and policy. Academics have always been present throughout the journal’s history, and most early papers contributed by university faculty, even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, were focused on practice. However, over the last few decades, an increasing number of academics have become involved in the journal and many of them consider themselves research scientists. There is a reason for this phenomenon. Beginning in the 1960s, rapid growth took place in transportation programs at universities, and a major determinant for faculty career advancement became academic productivity measured in terms of publications. In this pursuit, contributions to engineering practice became less important than contributions to theoretical knowledge as the engineering academic community started to emulate science faculty (Wulf 2003). After all, it is easy to count the number of papers or citations and h-indices, but it is not easy to come up with a comparative measure of the professional impact of an academic on engineering practice.

As for papers authored by practitioners, the motivation was mostly altruistic given that authorship did not necessarily help career advancement. Consequently, academics gradually took over writing, reviewing, and editing, crowding out the few practitioners who were still involved. The current state of affairs is such that academics consider practice papers not rigorous enough and practitioners think that most of the journal’s papers are too esoteric and contribute little to the advancement of engineering practice.

This discussion brings to my mind how Tolstoy, in War and Peace, described the conflict between Russian battle plans against the invasion of Napoleon as prepared by people of theory versus people of experience. The people of theory were brilliant generals with much knowledge of the science of war, but their plans were drawn away from the battlefield; in contrast, the people of experience were actually on the battlefield and their plans were tied to what they saw and felt. The moral here is this: theory is important, but practicality is vital, not only for battle plans but also for engineering publications.

The journal serves the transportation engineering profession by encouraging both theory and field experience. We should therefore actively reach out to practitioners to encourage them to join the editorial board as well as to author and review papers. With the emergence of connected and automated transportation, the involvement of the practice world not only will greatly add to the relevance of the journal but will also enrich the Society’s entire transportation engineering community. To accomplish this objective, however, we cannot simply appeal to volunteerism, but must offer some tangible benefits to practitioners in terms of added value to their careers. This will obviously require the Society and the T&DI leadership to seek the support of the upper management of private companies and public agencies.

The journal’s editorial process has evolved over the decades. The editorial board has been diversified, bringing a large number of interested individuals into the fold, including reviewers. These individuals represent a geographically diverse group of associate editors and reviewers from the US, Europe, and Asia, although most are from the US and China. Also, Part A’s editorial board has only one woman out of 21 associate editors and no underrepresented minority. The number of nonacademics has dwindled over the years, to one presently. Part B’s entire editorial board is composed of academics, with one woman. We need to reorganize our editorial boards, inviting practitioners as well as women and underrepresented minorities. A possible source of these individuals might be the journal’s large pool of reviewers. Some of them can be appropriately recognized by being invited to join the editorial board. Let us not forget the service of these worker bees who are absolutely essential to upholding the quality of the publications.

As I am writing this, I can imagine some eyes are rolling. In the last two decades, a plethora of new transportation journals has sprung up, and they are constantly jockeying for attention. Most of them are commercial, and I am not sure how much regard they have for scholarship. Nevertheless, intense gaming and other measures have allowed some of these journals to run up their impact factors, making them attractive to the academic community. Nevertheless, I feel serious consideration should be given to the addition of another part to the journal that will focus on emerging technologies, covering connected and autonomous transportation and other related initiatives such as electrification and shared mobility. Massive technological innovations are taking place that will dramatically transform the way we live, work, shop, and entertain. Civil engineers are major players in this process, and there is a need for a platform dedicated to civil engineering research in fast-developing technologies. These issues include planning related to user behavior, impact evaluation, possible changes in urban forms, cost analysis, investment decision making, physical infrastructure requirements, and institutional aspects. We are not going to vault over the transition between where we are now and where we may possibly be in a fully connected and automated environment with an electrified highway network. While developing the technological capability is difficult, a much more difficult endeavor is how to implement the technologies on the ground. The transition may last for many decades, and much scholarly and experimental work in these areas will continue. Having a separate part of the journal focus on the civil engineering aspects of connected and autonomous transportation (CAT) and related technologies will allow us to attract additional authors and possibly subscribers, at the same time increasing the journal’s visibility in these rapidly developing areas.