Communication Toolkit for Transportation Partners to Inform Road Travelers , released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have applied research results from TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program to policy decisions or used them to introduce or change practice, as a reference source, or for new or additional research. The NCHRP Impact Report 2019 , a follow up to the NCHRP Impact Report 2018 , attempts to document and present the outcomes and impacts of the application of NCHRP research results. Containing data and anecdotes compiled from various sources, the report pr...

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on May 6, 2020.

In the days of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), we are seeing a reduction in overall traffic volumes and crash-related injuries and fatalities. What are the nuances of this situation, and what lessons can we learn to advance transportation safety research and practice? TRB is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, May 20, 2020, from 1:00 to 2:30 PM Eastern that will explore the impacts of COVID-19 on traffic crashes and overall highway safety conditions. This webinar is cosponsored by the Pacific Southwest Regio...

Research problem statements are now being accepted for the FY 2021 Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP). To submit a problem statement, first review and follow  the format in this outline . Problem statements may be submitted electronically . Previously submitted proposals may be resubmitted. The deadline for consideration is June 19, 2020.   TCRP is managed by TRB and sponsored by the U.S. Federal Transit Administration (FTA). TCRP works in partnership with the American Public Transport...

More than 155,000 people born in countries such as Somalia, Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, and Mexico now call Columbus home. Their struggles are many, from employment to language to education and mental health. All of that has been exacerbated by COVID-19.

As May 1 looms, so do questions about rent, bills, housing and employment. Ohioans seeking answers can turn to legal groups offering free advice and an interactive web portal meant to help those often sidelined by the legal system because of cost and confusion.

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.

This episode originally aired on April 29, 2020. As May 1 looms, so do questions about rent, bills, housing and employment. Ohioans seeking answers can turn to legal groups offering free advice and an interactive web portal meant to help those often sidelined by the legal system because of cost and confusion.

Issue 324 of TRB's magazine (November-December 2019) focuses on climate change resilience. Along with several explorations within that topic, a short history of TRB is offered as well as all the usual standing features of the magazine. TR News is TRB's bimonthly magazine featuring timely articles on innovative and state-of-the-art research and practice in all modes of transportation. It also includes brief news items of interest to the transportation community, research pays off articles , profiles of tr...

The National Academies/TRB Forum on Preparing for Automated Vehicles and Shared Mobility is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, May 13 at 2:00 – 3:30 PM Eastern to focus on the role of AV and Shared mobility in light of COVID-19. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required . Speakers include: Effect of COVID-19 on AVs , Annie Chang and Ed Straub of SAE International Effect of COVI19 on Shared Mobility , Susan Shaheen of University of California, Berkeley COVID-19 and New Par...

COVID-19 Impacts on the Trucking Industry , released by the American Transportation Research Institute

The National Academies/TRB Forum on Preparing for Automated Vehicles and Shared Mobility is hosting a webinar on Wednesday, May 13 at 2:00 – 3:30 PM Eastern to focus on the role of AV and Shared mobility in light of COVID-19. The online event is free and open to the public, but registration is required . Speakers include: Effect of COVID-19 on AVs , Annie Chang and Ed Straub of SAE International Effect of COVI19 on Shared Mobility , Susan Shaheen of University of California, Berkeley COVID-19 and New Par...

If you’re fortunate enough to still be working during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, you are likely to be doing so from home. Teleworking (or telecommuting) has been suddenly and widely adopted. For example, Arizona DOT reports doubling the number of employees who telework in multiple departments in just two weeks. In conjunction with Texas' disaster declaration related to COVID-19, TxDOT is also requiring its office-based employees to telework beginning March 16. Your workplace is likely making si...

Обычные тесты будут проводиться за счет работодателя, а тесты на антитела оплатит город

Архивные фото первого Дня Победы

In March 2020, EPA announced a new website for finding key EPA resources about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) virus. Additional information can be found on CDC's Coronavirus (COVID-19) website, a list of Disinfectants EPA's Pesticide Program recommend (today) to ward off spreading the virus, and CDC's list of symptoms to watch for.

Issue 324 of TRB's magazine (November-December 2019) focuses on climate change resilience. Along with several explorations within that topic, a short history of TRB is offered as well as all the usual standing features of the magazine. TR News is TRB's bimonthly magazine featuring timely articles on innovative and state-of-the-art research and practice in all modes of transportation. It also includes brief news items of interest to the transportation community, research pays off articles , profiles of tr...

As more COVID-19 outbreaks are reported around the world, it’s important to stay calm, be informed, and take steps to protect yourself and others. Although older and chronically ill adults face greater risks, teens and young adults are also facing serious health complications from COVID-19. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “Don’t get the attitude, ‘Well, I’m young, I’m invulnerable’ ... you don’t want to put your loved ones at risk, particularly the ones who are elderly and the ones who have compromised conditions. We can’t do this without the young people cooperating. Please cooperate with us.”

While there is currently no vaccine against COVID-19, there are things you can do to take care of your health. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth. Wash your hands frequently with soap and water for at least 20 seconds (the time it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice). Dry your hands thoroughly after washing them. If soap and water aren’t available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Cleaning and disinfecting surfaces that are commonly used by people can help, too. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released a list of approved disinfectants to help protect against the spread of COVID-19 on their website.

As the COVID-19 situation continues to develop, it seems the best thing to do is follow the advice in the Scouts BSA handbook, "What to Do When Lost": Stay calm, think, observe, and plan. ...

Кассин Юрий Петрович - первый турист, который взошёл на пик Сталина в 1959 году.

Друзья, приветствую вас! Шесть лет назад, в 2015 году к 120-летию самодеятельного туризма, меня попросили написать Летопись о восхождениях горных туристов на семитысячники. В процессе подготовки этого материала в моих руках оказалось столько информации, что возникла мысль всё это зафиксировать, а, главное, систематизировать. Таким образом, появились три составляющих:
1. Список горных туристов, взошедших на семитысячники в период с 1959 по 1991 год.
2. Летопись восхождений с 1959 по 1991 год.
3. Список погибших горных туристов

Психологически очень трудно проходить сложнейшие перевалы рядом с вершинами, до которых «рукой подать» и не зайти на вершину. Занимаясь туризмом как спортом, классифицируя походы по сложности, туристы изобретали всевозможные искусственные «перевалы», например, «перевал» между двумя вершинами Эльбруса, «перевал» через плато Правды рядом с пиком Коммунизма и, кажется, даже «перевал» через седловину между двумя вершинами Ушбы. Выход на такие перевалы включает большую и технически сложнейшую часть восхождения на гору. Однако туристам вершины запрещены. Запреты обходят, как могут: например, включают в маршрут «выход на панорамную точку для фотографирования», или просто совершают восхождения втихаря, подальше от посторонних глаз, многократно увеличивая тем самым опасность тяжелых последствий любой аварии. Эти слова принадлежат Юрию Слезину – МС СССР по альпинизму, доктору наук.

Он прав, до слов «Однако, туристам вершины запрещены». Напротив Конституция СССР провозглашала равенство прав всех граждан страны и запрещала ограничивать свободу передвижения в своей стране для любого её гражданина. Никакие партийные, общественные или спортивные организации не имели права нарушать основной закон государства!

Именно эти два мнения определяли коллизию отношений между альпинистами и горными туристами во второй половине прошлого века. Альпинисты обижались на то, что им приходилось иногда отвлекаться от своих дел и помогать туристам, попавшим в беду. Туристы обижались на нарушения их конституционных прав.

Начало обозначенного в заглавии периода времени соответствует первому восхождению туриста на семитысячник, а конец – прекращению существования СССР. Представленный обзор содержит в хронологическом порядке все, известные мне, факты восхождений. В связи с отсутствием официальной регистрации рассматриваемых восхождений могут встречаться неточности. Кроме этого некоторые ссылки могут быть не актуальны, поскольку материал начал собираться с 2015 г. Номер маршрута совпадает со списком взошедших по годам. Стиль изложения будет различаться друг от друга, поскольку старался придерживаться текстов, присланных первоисточниками. Эта летопись, я думаю, будет постоянно дополняться. Друзья, надеюсь на вашу помощь!

For obvious reasons, there has been a lot of attention paid to work going into developing vaccines that could prevent Covid-19 infection, and drugs that could treat it. In particular, there has been some excitement about new animal trial data for remdesivir, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences. Gilead's share price rose nearly 10% on the day the trial data were announced.
It will be some time yet before the safety and efficacy of remdesvir is established, if ever (it's worth noting that it was tried, unsuccessfully, as a treatment for Ebola). And since I started work on this post…

В номере: Перенесение мощей благоверных князей Бориса и Глеба, Проповедь на Евангельское чтение, Господь верит в нас, Вопрос священнику: Плохо в доме, проблемы. Как быть? От лечения ослеп и перестал глотать.

  Visiting libraries is great. Neat things to learn about communities, comfy places to sit, clean bathrooms. I went to...

I started 132 books this year and finished 127. New this year: a twitter thread of everything I read in...

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.

You may recall in the early days of the pandemic, that pharma giant Gilead Sciences -- which has been accused of price gouging and (just last year!) charging exorbitant prices on drug breakthroughs developed with US taxpayer funds -- was able to sneak through an orphan works designation for its drug remdesevir for COVID-19 treatment. As we pointed out, everything about this was insane, given that orphan works designations, which give extra monopoly rights to the holders (beyond patent exclusivity), are meant for diseases that don't impact a large population. Gilead used a loophole: since the ceiling for infected people to qualify for orphan drug status is 200,000, Gilead got in its application bright and early, before there were 200,000 confirmed cases (we currently have over 1.3 million). After the story went, er... viral, Gilead agreed to drop the orphan status, realizing the bad publicity it was receiving.

After a brief dalliance with chloroquine, remdesivir has suddenly been back in demand as the new hotness of possible COVID-19 treatments. Still, a close reading of the research might give one pause. There have been multiple conflicting studies, and Gilead's own messaging has been a mess.

On April 23, 2020, news of the study’s failure began to circulate. It seems that the World Health Organization (WHO) had posted a draft report about the trial on their clinical trials database, which indicated that the scientists terminated the study prematurely due to high levels of adverse side effects.

The WHO withdrew the report, and the researchers published their results in The Lancet on April 29, 2020.

The number of people who experienced adverse side effects was roughly similar between those receiving remdesivir and those receiving a placebo. In 18 participants, the researchers stopped the drug treatment due to adverse reactions.

But then...

However, also on April 29, 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced that their NIH trial showed that remdesivir treatment led to faster recovery in hospital patients with COVID-19, compared with placebo treatment.

“Preliminary results indicate that patients who received remdesivir had a 31% faster time to recovery than those who received placebo,” according to the press release. “Specifically, the median time to recovery was 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir compared with 15 days for those who received placebo.”

The mortality rate in the remdesivir treatment group was 8%, compared with 11.6% in the placebo group, indicating that the drug could improve a person’s chances of survival. These data were close to achieving statistical significance.

And then...

“In addition, there is another Chinese trial, also stopped because the numbers of new patients with COVID-19 had fallen in China so they were unable to recruit, which has not yet published its data,” Prof. Evans continues. “There are other trials where remdesivir is compared with non-remdesivir treatments currently [being] done and results from some of these should appear soon.”

Gilead also put out its own press release about another clinical trial, which seems more focused on determining the optimal length of remdesivir treatment. Suffice it to say, there's still a lot of conflicting data and no clear information on whether or not remdesevir actually helps.

Still, that hasn't stopped people from trying to figure out just how much Gilead will price gouge going forward:

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), which assesses effectiveness of drugs to determine appropriate prices, suggested a maximum price of $4,500 per 10-day treatment course based on the preliminary evidence of how much patients benefited in a clinical trial. Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday said remdesivir should be priced at $1 per day of treatment, since “that is more than the cost of manufacturing at scale with a reasonable profit to Gilead.”

Some Wall Street investors expect Gilead to come in at $4,000 per patient or higher to make a profit above remdesivir’s development cost, which Gilead estimates at about $1 billion.

So... we've got a range of $10 to $4,500 on a treatment that we don't yet know works, and which may or may not save lives. But, given that we're in the midst of a giant debate concerning things like "reopening the economy" -- something that can really only be done if the public is not afraid of dying (or at least becoming deathly ill) -- the value to the overall economy seems much greater than whatever amount Gilead wants to charge. It seems the right thing to do -- again, if it's shown that remdesevir actually helps -- is to just hand over a bunch of money to Gilead, say "thank you very much" and get the drug distributed as widely as possible. Though, again, it should be noted that a decent chunk of the research around remdesevir was not done or paid for by Gilead, but (yet again) via public funds to public universities, which did the necessary research. The idea that it's Gilead that should get to reap massive rewards for that seems sketchy at best. But the absolute worst outcome is one in which Gilead sticks to its standard operating procedure and prices the drug in a way that millions of Americans can't afford it, and it leads to a prolonging/expanding of the pandemic.