TRB Committee on Transportation and Public Health AME70

TRB ANNUAL MEETING 2025

The review results for papers have been sent. We look forward to seeing everyone in Washington. 

For more information on this call for papers, contact:

David Ederer (Paper Review Coordinator), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, xhj2"at"cdc.gov

Ipek Nese Sener (Chair), Texas A&M Transportation Institute, i-sener"at"tti.tamu.edu

Papers (7,500 words or less—including the abstract, text, references, figures, and tables) must be electronically submitted to TRB no later than August 1, 2024. Note that full papers are required for all submissions for the TRB 2025 Annual Meeting. Papers may be submitted for publication only, presentation only, or for both presentation and publication.

Please review the updated guidelines for information on paper format requirements and paper templates. Accepted papers or research summaries will be made available to meeting attendees (more information about summaries will be provided at acceptance).

Two different calls:

1) Expanding our Knowledge of Transportation and Health (PDF version)

• The Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Transportation and Public Health (AME70) seeks papers expanding our understanding and evaluation of transportation and public health. In 2024, TRB identified “Advancing Public Health” as a Critical Issue in Transportation.

• We welcome papers that contribute to the growing body of knowledge on transportation and health, including those that address concepts, principles, theories, methodologies, and applications. We are particularly interested in:

• Approaches in building health-promoting cross-sector collaborations and institutional relationships, as well as case studies describing them.

• Development and application of metrics to advance consideration of health impacts in transportation decision-making.

• Research questions of interest to this call may include, but are not limited to:

• Evidence-based approaches to maximizing health benefits while addressing potential adverse impacts of planning and policy decisions through engineering and design.

• Examination of actionable policies for safe and healthy streets (e.g., the role of the safe-systems approach, Vision Zero, and guidelines for road danger reduction).

• Assessment and evaluation of the collaboration and coordination between different organizations (including those from the government and the private sector) to address complex health issues related to transportation.

• Innovative use of theoretical frameworks in practical applications to improve our understanding of the links between transportation and health.

• Quantification of health impacts and benefits of transportation actions and policies.

• Studies on changes in infrastructure design, mode shift, or transportation practice in response to recent emergencies (including but not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic).

• Studies the role of emerging transportation technologies (e.g., autonomous vehicles, smart transportation systems) in promoting healthy and sustainable transportation options.

• Studies that utilize technologies such as generative AI in planning, testing, and implementing transportation strategies to improve public health (such as in predicting patterns, crash hotspots, and the spread of diseases through transportation networks or realistic simulations to test infrastructure changes).

2) Transportation and Mental Health (PDF version)

The Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee on Transportation and Public Health (AME70) seeks papers expanding our understanding and evaluation of transportation and public health. In 2024, TRB identified “Advancing Public Health” as a Critical Issue in Transportation.

We welcome papers focusing on mental health and transportation. We are particularly interested in the examination of transportation as a barrier and contributor to mental health.

Research questions of interest to this call may include, but are not limited to:

• Exploration and examination of how mode choice influences mental health.

• Exploration and examination of transportation access to mental health services and treatment.

• Exploration and examination of how travel experiences influence mental health, such as how commuting time or transit reliability influences mental health or how nature-based or recreational travel can reduce stress and improve wellbeing.

• Exploration and examination of how the perception of safety while traveling is related to mental health and wellbeing.

• Methods and models that help improve our knowledge of diverse impacts and issues related to mental health with respect to vulnerable populations.

• Evaluation of expanded access to transportation through geography, affordability, and inclusivity and effects of expanded access on mental health.

• Analysis of the intersectionality of mental health and transportation equity with other social determinants of health, such as race, gender, age, and socioeconomic status.

• Evaluation of occupational mental health for transportation workers (e.g. transit operators, freight workers).

Note: For reference, one may access the old Health and Transportation Subcommittee website https://sites.google.com/site/trbhealthandtransport/ or the TRB Task Force on Arterials and Public Health website https://sites.google.com/site/arterialstaskforce/. Both old sites were built in Google's "classic sites", which will be archived and removed in September 2021 because Google no longer supports them.