This is a quick update from my attendance of the 2021 Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting. The conference was held in a fully online format, and as a result, events were spread over the entire month, with the first & second weeks being filled with committee meetings, and the third & fourth weeks being filled with research presentations & workshops. This was my first time attending this particular conference, and it was my first time attending a conference of this size in the field of transportation since switching into this field. That said, I knew going in that certain aspects, like networking, might feel less satisfying compared to what they would have been if this conference had happened in person in normal circumstances.
I really enjoyed the committee meeting about the transportation needs of people with disabilities, and the later presentation session about the same subject, as those are among my primary research topics right now. I also really enjoyed the workshop about the history & future of road pricing, precisely because that topic is only tangentially related to my research interests, so it was fun to think about these issues that I wouldn't normally think about. Plus, in all of those sessions, I was able to meet people and expand my professional network to some degree.
Of course, the networking aspect fell far short of what I would have expected for normal circumstances, but that wasn't too surprising. More disappointing was that the last week of this conference was plagued by technical difficulties that led to me missing several sessions that I wanted to attend. In particular, the website was designed quite badly, as it often didn't load correctly, and when it did load, it was often quite difficult to navigate to the desired sessions (as it was set up to "mimic" the "spatial layout" of a convention center). Furthermore, although setting up poster sessions as a series of chat rooms may have seemed like a good idea at first, it ended up being quite frustrating to use in practice (when it worked at all), so I felt rather discouraged from signing up for further sessions.
Overall, I'm glad to have attended the committee meetings, and while I generally enjoyed the research presentation sessions that I did attend, I was rather frustrated by how this conference was rife with technical difficulties. I hope this will be a lesson for future online conferences, and I hope too that progress with vaccines against this coronavirus will mean that in-person conferences can return soon enough. (Please note that I have no expertise in epidemiology, virology, or vaccine development, so I cannot claim to prognosticate on this matter.)
Unrelated to this, please note that the public Facebook & Twitter pages for this blog have been deleted. This is because of my unhappiness with those companies' recent actions and my desire to migrate away from those platforms. Of course, this blog will continue to be published here until further notice, and it is still possible to sign up for an email subscription for new posts on this blog.
