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Background

The high level of mobility and affordable access made possible by the U.S. transportation system is critical to America's economic well-being and quality of life. The nation's sheer physical size makes a high-quality, high performance, reliable and efficient national transportation system central to our domestic and global competitiveness. However, that system faces severe challenges. A growing and changing population demands higher capacity, greater efficiency and ever-improving levels of service. At the same time, adverse environmental impacts as well as death and injury rates have been significantly reduced in recent decades, but are still at levels unacceptable to most people.

The FY 2000 budget of the United States notes that "Science and technology are principal agents of change and progress, with over half of the Nation's economic productivity growth in the last 50 years attributable to technological innovation and the science that supports it." This statement has particular applicability to the transportation sector, which has been dramatically transformed by technology for more than a century and a half. The steam engine was a central factor in the industrial revolution and global expansion. Railroads, drawing on enabling technologies such as the steam engine, telegraph, and innovative civil engineering, remade America in the mid-1800s. The electric streetcar made suburbs possible in the late 19th century. The early years of the 20th century saw the development and vigorous exploitation of the internal combustion engine. The "superhighway" now makes possible a level of personal mobility hardly imagined a century ago. More recently, the jet engine, the "mega-ship," and containerized freight have made their appearance. Modern transportation is virtually defined by these technologies.

The needs of the future can only be met by continuing advances in a wide range of technologies and their timely incorporation into transportation applications. Research and development is an essential component in the innovation process, and the Federal government is a major participant in basic and applied research as well as subsequent development. A significant portion of research and development (R&D) has the potential to enable significant technological innovations in transportation, though much of it is performed to meet agency responsibilities in other spheres. It is especially important that the full spectrum of government R&D be identified, regardless of the agency involved or the purpose of the research, to assure that the transportation system will realize maximum benefits.

Accordingly, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Transportation R&D has undertaken an assessment of the full range of Federal research potentially relevant to transportation. This topic-Enabling Research- represents one of the four basic elements of the NSTC Transportation Science and Technology Strategy, as suggested in Figure 1-1. Together with the other three elements, the result is a comprehensive approach to structuring and coordinating Federal transportation science and technology activities.

The Strategic Planning and Assessment element provides the outcome goals, overall coordination, and assessment that are the framework for the other parts of the strategy. Strategic Partnership Initiatives seek to combine and leverage resources from multiple agencies and the private sector to expedite near-term application of emerging technological advances. The fourth element, Education and Training, ensures a continuing investment in the human capital of those who plan, design, construct, operate and maintain the transportation system.

Figure 1-1 Elements of the Transportation Science and Technology Strategy

Purpose

This plan is the product of an overview assessment of transportation-related enabling research now being conducted by Federal agencies. Its purpose is to describe, from a high-level perspective, the broad range of Federal research now underway that can enable the advances needed in the next century, and to provide the foundation necessary for coordination and full exploitation of all transportation-related R&D.

Methodology and Scope

This plan is based on an extensive literature search of government documents, publications, and Internet Web sites. This includes a review of materials provided by the agencies and institutions that are part of the Federal research community. However, in order to achieve both completeness and consistency across agencies, the budget data reported here are all derived from the RaDiUS (Research and Development in the United States) database. This resource, established by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and implemented through the RAND Corporation, contains R&D budget authority and project information covering 25 Federal agencies. It involves more than 1,500 programs and nearly 300,000 separate grants and contracts. It tracks virtually all of the more than $70 billion annual Federal research expenditure. ^{1, 2} (Wherever the term "funding" is used in this document, it refers to budget authority.)

Based on the literature search, the scope of this plan includes research conducted by the Departments of Transportation (DOT), Energy (DOE), Commerce (DOC) and Defense (DoD), as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and National Science Foundation (NSF). These agencies represent a major portion of all Federal R&D, with the remainder conducted largely by the National Institutes of Health. The Federal budget process established by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is embodied in RaDiUS, characterizes R&D as basic research, applied research and development. For this initial examination, all three categories were included as potentially representing enabling research, though development of a technology for a non-transportation application may still not be close to market-readiness for application in transportation.

Based on project or program titles in the RaDiUS budget data-supplemented where possible by other resources-the research and development judged to be transportation-related was identified. Then it was grouped quantitatively for each agency in terms of the seven enabling research categories defined in the Transportation Science and Technology Strategy (See Section 2.1 and Section 3). Illustrative examples of specific R&D projects for the various agencies were also presented for each category, based on information from a variety of resources including organization R&D plans and World Wide Web sites.

The process is necessarily imprecise. Given the great extent and breadth of Federal R&D, and the overview nature of this plan, the assessment did not include examination of detailed program and project text descriptions. In some instances, the titles of research projects as reported in the RaDiUS database do not provide a clear indication of the projects' transportation-related components. In other instances, the research categories focus on the application rather than the technical area or discipline, and do not have a direct correlation with the seven categories.

It is not always possible to make a clear distinction between enabling research and elements of the strategic partnership initiatives set forth in the NSTC Strategy. The initiatives, having a more near-term focus, can draw on funds appropriated for R&D, advanced development, evaluation and test, and implementation. Accordingly, there is some overlap of the enabling research addressed in this plan and the research portions of the initiatives. Appendix A provides a list and brief description of the initiatives.

Another source of uncertainty is that different types of research may be conducted within one overall program or project. For example, research on human performance and behavior is often subsumed in overall system development projects, and therefore is not visible in the RaDiUS tables. The overall research titles and RaDiUS categories do not indicate the human performance and behavior component to the research. Thus, the judgments as to relevance to transportation, and, to a lesser degree, the appropriate category of enabling research, are inherently somewhat uncertain. However, for the purpose of providing a broad picture of transportation-related research, indicating the major participating agencies, and assessing the distribution among R&D categories, the data presented in this plan should be fully satisfactory.

A central resource in shaping this plan has been a workshop conducted for the NSTC Technology Committee, with DOT funding by the National Research Council (NRC)/Transportation Research Board (TRB) in September 1998. This event brought together knowledgeable individuals from academia, the private sector, and Federal agencies to identify (1) important research already being funded within the government-not necessarily linked to transportation-which could be leveraged by the transportation sector; (2) areas that could lead to breakthroughs in transportation technologies, concepts and systems; and (3) research areas that warrant funding priority. This external review enables this plan to be considered national in scope, rather than reflecting merely the perspective of the federal government.

1 More detailed analysis of specific aspects of this topic is facilitated by the numerous Internet World Wide Web sites for the relevant agencies and other organizations that track research activities.
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2 The data in RaDiUS come from many sources located throughout the Federal Government. Among these sources are the Department of Defense R-1 and R-2 Budget Exhibits and Technical Effort And Management System; the Department of Energy laboratory information system; the Federal Procurement Data System; the Office of Management and Budget MAX system; the National Science Foundation Science and Technology System; and NASA's 507 System.
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