RSG's Shadde Rosenblum will be attending the 2013 ITE Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. This event will include a mix of presentation formats including hands-on practical application workshops and sessions that will focus on state-of-the practice, advancement of the profession, and emerging issues designed to benefit transportation professionals.

RSG Senior Director Nelson Whipple will be teaching a class on New Product Development designed for MBA students at the University of Washington, Bothell. This class will be based off a chapter in The PDMA Toolbook 3, Applying Trade-off Analysis to Get The Most From Customer Needs. The goal for this class for the students to try Max Diff analysis themselves in new product projects required for the course.

Senior Consultant Steve Gayle will be attending, “A Modern Infrastructure for a Modern Agriculture,” as part of the inaugural Agricultural Transportation Summit hosted by the National Grain and Feed Association and the Soy Transportation Coalition. The goals of this summit are (1) to raise awareness of the importance of transportation to the success and profitability of U.S. agriculture; (2) to precipitate and motivate further action to promote a transportation infrastructure that better serves the needs of agriculture; and (3) to build connections between government and agricultural interest to better promote transportation issues.

RSG Consultant Nikhil Sikka is attending Modeling and Simulation of Transportation Networks, a week long course part of MIT's professional education short programs. This week long course will cover world’s most sophisticated transportation network and demand models, dynamic traffic assignment models, activity-based models, and related analytical techniques necessary in the planning, design, and operations of transportation systems. The course is sponsored by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will be taught by world’s leading experts in the field including, Professor Moshe Ben-Akiva (MIT), Haris Koutsopoulos (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Hani Mahmassani (Northwestern University), Ennio Cascetta (University of Naples/Ministry of Transport – Regione Campania, Italy), and/or Pierluigi Coppola (University of Rome).

RSG Senior Director Peter Plumeau is headed to Washington, D.C to participate in the summer meeting of the TRB Freight, Marine, and Planning Committees. This conference will blend the traditional mid-year business meetings of standing committees with plenary and focus sessions addressing topics with implications for multimodal freight planning, goods movement and freight system resiliency. The conference will open with a plenary session conveying the challenges faced by public sector agencies at all levels (Federal, State, MPO, and Corridor-level organizations) in facilitating and implementing the freight provisions of the latest surface transportation authorization law known as MAP-21.

RSG's Jeffery Dumont will be presenting, “The Use of the Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value Modeling Framework when the Budget is Latent: Two Consumer Package Good Examples” at the International Choice Modelling Conference in Sydney, Australia.

The Town of Seabrook Planning Board recently voted to amend their Site Plan Regulations to include RSG's traffic exaction formula for US 1 through Town. US 1 is a densely developed commercial corridor that faces significant development pressure and ongoing traffic congestion. RSG worked with the Town of Seabrook (NH) to develop a clear, understandable approach to developer traffic exactions (i.e., per trip cost that a developer must pay to develop along a specific corridor to fund road improvements) that would provide a fair and level playing ground for developers and allow the Town and NHDOT to finance critical improvements to the US 1 corridor. It is great to see our work making a positive impact.

The Supreme Court ruled today in favor of equal treatment under federal law for legally married same-sex couples, a position RSG supported in an employer amicus brief filed earlier this year on behalf of 278 employers nationwide. RSG was one of only two Vermont companies to sign the brief, which argued that DOMA forced employers to separate lawfully married employees into two categories—married same-sex couples and married opposite-sex couples—for taxation purposes and benefits administration.

RSG's Steven Gayle will be attending a Federal Highway Administration peer exchange on the impact of fracking on state and local roads. There has been a great deal of interest in the how heavy vehicles related to natural gas drilling and hydro-fracking impact roads, and what state and local governments are doing in response. This event brings experts from North Dakota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Senior Consultant Vince Bernardin will be attending this overview of the Evansville, Indiana MPO’s hybrid tour-based model, including motivation for the approach, introduction to the hybrid architecture and select results.