The highway research board—Electronics and information

Abstract

The Highway Research Board (HRB) was established in 1920 as a unit of the Division of Engineering, National Research Council, under the corporate authority of the National Academy of Sciences. Its purpose then, as now, was fourfold: 1) to stimulate highway research 2) to correlate highway research 3) to make known the findings of highway research 4) to undertake, when appropriate, special highway research projects. The interest of the HRB in electronics goes back many years. Many of its committees have been concerned with the use of computers, photogrammetry, instrumentation, traffic surveillance and control, and similar uses. Test instrumentation and data reduction techniques, developed at the HRB's large field tests of highway pavements in the 1950s, were highly sophisticated at the time. The services of the HRB include the Highway Research Information Service (HRIS), which became operational in 1967 and represents one of the most complete compilations of information on highway-related research available in the United States. The scope of the information stored in the system is as broad as the problems of planning, building, maintaining, and operating transportation systems. Subjects range from parking regulation to soil stabilization, from aggregates to aesthetics, from hydrology to psychology, anything having to do with highway travel or its interaction with other modes of transportation. The science of information transfer is progressing very rapidly. The HRB will keep abreast of new developments in technology; therefore, HRIS, the Maritime Research Information Service (MRIS), and the Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) necessarily will be under a continuing state of review and will be modified from time to time to keep up with new developments as soon as they are proven effective.