Ahhh, the Transportation Research Board and its annual convention in Washington, D.C.

Another two days of tramping in the frigid January air between two hotels, and riding a packed grim shuttle to the third one. (One year, I discovered a half empty bottle of whiskey wedged between the shuttle seat and the wall. I would love to have seen that person¹s presentation. Another lunchtime procession of name-badge festooned suits marching toward an array of mediocre nearby restaurants, hoping the wait won¹t be too long. Another 1.5 gazillion sessions to choose from, ranging from PowerPoint presentations on hot-mix longitudinal joints to PowerPoint presentations on elderly drivers to PowerPoint presentations on everything you need to know about this issue, that new legislation or somebody¹s project (sans project costs, name of contractor, details on what went wrong and any other useful info).

They used to treat us media folk well, with a press room set aside back in the depths of the Marriott, through long winding corridors. The location is the same, but the cookies and coffee are gone. I was quite upset when we first got deprived of caffeine and sugar about three years ago. I guess once the New York Times guy stopped coming, it didn't matter. (I'm kidding). This last trip there was a single bottle of water, floating forlornly in a bucket of what used to be ice.

There used to be a couple of lovely ladies who sat in the press room, signing us up on the spot and saying "Welcome back!" Now it sits empty every conference, and I have to stand in line for general on-site registration.

The Marriott staffer simply could not figure out what to do with a media registration. "Do media have to pay?" he asked. As a mysterious "other" on the registration form, I waited 15 minutes as he wrestled with his computer.

I ended up with a badge that affiliated me with the Army Corps of Engineers. Oops.

I complain light-heartedly, because I've been coming to this thing for almost a decade. It really is an extraordinarily large gathering of a cross-section of folk--3,000--from all sectors of transportation. I've seen sessions on ideas in their infancy that years later became full-fledged construction projects (case in point: Shanghai's maglev train). With such a confluence of disciplines, no trend is missed. There were sessions on things long before they became buzzwords (tolling, sustainability, public-private partnerships).

The international mix seems definitely to have increased. I saw posses of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Indians floating through the hallways. I have always wondered why all the Asian Americans I know, and the Asians I observe, seem to travel in groups while I skulk about like an alley cat (which I prefer).

The diversity seemed even more impressive this year. There was a bevy of baby-faced attendees, minorities and even a woman sporting purple-dyed spiked hair along with her business suit and name badge. There were whole sessions on road concessions in South America, transit villages in Europe, bicycling paths in China. But the diversity hasn't infiltrated everywhere--I attended a session on sustainable concrete where I was literally the only non-business-suited person there. Aside from two women who huddled together, I was the only female. The man next to me kept glancing over, whether in curiosity, contempt or just sheer "what-in-the-world-is-SHE-doing-here" attitude, I do not know. But it¹s still going to happen once in a while.

I for the life of me have never managed to make it to an 8 a.m. session, and I can only wonder how many people attended a 7:30-9:30 p.m. session on tribal road finance (which I thought sounded like a worthy topic but destined for fringe status). Incredible amounts of useful information are gathered, and much of it is never used. Occasional wastes of time occur, and the occasional dynamic non-mumbling speaker is greatly appreciated. But based on what I saw at TRB's 86th annual meeting, the transportation industry is diversifying in more ways than one. It's going to be impossible to think of a road as just a road without thinking of what lies around it and what gets affected by it. And it's illogical to consider American transportation in a vacuum without looking beyond the borders and oceans at what¹s going on elsewhere in the world. Engineers and planners, policymakers and professors are starting to realize all this, and hopefully contractors, too. The industry leaders knew it for a while, but maybe too many people missed seeing their PowerPoint presentations a year or two years ago.

See you next year. Same time, same place.