The Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C. is always a reunion of sorts for UCLA students, faculty, and alumni who study transportation. The program is quite extensive, with nearly 800 sessions throughout the five-day meeting and over 12,000 transportation professionals in attendance. Amid these crowds, one could almost always find a fellow UCLA scholar within eyesight. UCLA sent presenters to 20 sessions this year, including a standing-room-only panel discussion on millenials and travel behavior, at which Professors Brian Taylor and Evelyn Blumenberg spoke.
Over 150 guests packed into the annual “UCLA in DC” reception hosted by the Lewis Center and the Institute of Transportation Studies at La Tomate Bistro. Director Brian Taylor gave the door prizes, including the prize for most TRBs attended, which went to Professor Emeritus Martin Wachs, who has attended 50 TRBs.
UCLA also had a cameo at the packed Six Minute Pitch session. In this competition, transportation entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to investors, and then fielded a live Q&A from the investors in a format similar to the television show Shark Tank. When one of the investors tried to pass off a photo of UCLA’s Royce Hall as another university, investor Gabe Klein corrected them after reading one of Madeline Brozen’s tweets live.
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