Over the past decade, highway and urban congestion have garnered the attention of commuters as well as government entities. Facility joint-use, by expanding public transit using existing rail corridors, is one approach to solving the constellation of problems occurring as offshoots of congestion. The potential and feasibility of shared use of rail corridors, between light rail vehicles (associated with public transit) and freight railroads, to function compatibly are still being investigated, even as current "near shared-track" operations are evolving.

The architect's primary source for information on designing for egress, evacuation, and life safety, Egress Design Solutions, Emergency Evacuation and Crowd Management Planning, is written by proven experts on egress issues. Meacham and Tubbs are engineers with Arup, an international firm with a stellar reputation for quality design and engineering. Their book examines egress solutions in terms of both prescriptive and performance-based code issues. A portion of the book focuses on techniques for providing egress design solutions and for coordinating egress systems with other critical life safety systems. Another part reviews historic and recent tragic life-loss fire events. As such, this is easily the most comprehensive take on the subject, written especially for architects.

"TRB's Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 117: Design, Operation, and Safety of At-Grade Crossings of Exclusive Busways explores planning, designing, and operating various kinds of busways through roadway intersections. The report examines at-grade intersections along busways within arterial street medians; physically separated, side-aligned busways; busways on separate rights-of-way; and bus-only ramps. The intersections highlighted include highway intersections, midblock pedestrian crossings, and bicycle crossings. Appendixes A through I of the contractor's final report were published as TCRP Web-Only Document 36"--Publisher's website

This Guidebook will aid states in developing public-private partnerships with private freight railroads to permit operation of passenger services over shared-use rail corridors. The Guidebook should encourage the broad acceptance of improved principles, processes, and methods to support agreements on access, allocation of operation and maintenance costs, capacity allocation, operational issues, future responsibilities for infrastructure improvements, and other fundamental issues that will affect the ultimate success of shared-use passenger and freight agreements between public and private railroad stakeholders.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 153: Guidelines for Providing Access to Public Transportation Stations is intended to aid in the planning, developing, and improving of access to high capacity commuter rail, heavy rail, light rail, bus rapid transit, and ferry stations. The report includes guidelines for arranging and integrating various station design elements.

In 1920, state highway engineers, federal officials, and experts from academia were among a small group convened by the National Academy of Sciences to confront the problems of the highway. The public was entrusting them with billions of dollars for good roads, and World War I had proved the feasibility of moving freight long distances by truck. But even new highways were crumbling. They turned to research for solutions. The founders of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and the generations that followed took on problems such as safety, social equity, and environmental issues. They embraced "total transportation," adapting their highway research model to urban transportation and then applying it to rail, marine, and aviation modes. Today TRB convenes thousands of researchers, practitioners, and administrators every year to advise the government, solve practical problems, foster innovation, and stimulate new research. In The Transportation Research Board, 1920â€"2020: Everyone Interested Is Invited, Sarah Jo Peterson tells the story of how people and institutions created and have continued to shape TRB. In a compelling narrative accompanied by more than 150 images exploring the history of transportation and research, she argues that TRB can be best understood as an infrastructureâ€"one that people purposely designed and devotedly maintained. Despite TRB's institutional complexity, its unique mission, the vast collection of acronyms in its orbit, and the significant changes to the organization in its first 100 years, Dr. Peterson provides a view from 30,000 feet, deftly describing the social, political, and economic context in which transportation (and TRB) functioned. At the same time, she attends to details of the key events, individuals, and human motivations that shaped TRB's evolution. The author's skills as a historian, her experience in the transportation field, and her manifest ability to tell a good story have produced a book that transportation professionals of all stripesâ€"and, for that matter, anyone interested in the history of transportation in the United Statesâ€"should find both engaging and informative and an essential addition to their library.