• Increasing Road Safety, which will depend on reducing fatality and injury rates by advancing crash avoidance technologies as the gradual evolution toward greater autonomy unfolds, learning from the experience of other nations that have built public acceptance about enacting effective policies such as lower speed limits and safety cameras, and developing a rigorous scientific basis for policies such as Vision Zero and Complete Streets.
• Advancing Public Health and environmental justice, which will be partially achieved as the nation shifts away from fossil fuels to EVs. This shift will reduce harmful emissions and noise from road vehicles but will also require mitigating the similarly harmful emissions from alternative fuels while also improving transportation access to health care and increasing options for active travel.
• Promoting Equity and Inclusion spans far more than transportation, but transportation can play a supportive role by expanding access to opportunity via multiple modes; redressing past isolation of discriminated against communities by the location, construction, and operation of transportation infrastructure; documenting best practices in expanding equity and inclusion; and developing measures of inequities and prioritizing equity in future plans and investments.

Successfully addressing these challenges through transportation programs and policies is highly dependent on aligning governance; land use regulation; funding and finance; a diverse, skilled workforce; and innovation toward serving societal goals. Doing so requires addressing the multi-faceted critical issues outlined in this publication and how they influence transportation, including in the following areas:

• Governance: documenting successes and failures, and reasons for both, in overcoming fragmented responsibilities in providing, managing, and regulating transportation infrastructure.
• Land Use: showing how transportation and land use planning and oversight can be better aligned across institutions to serve public goals for future development patterns that require less energy and are more equitable.
• Funding and Finance: developing evidence about (a) the merits of user fee–based taxes, fees, and tolls to replace motor fuel taxes and options for mitigating any adverse equity impacts; (b) the pros and cons of public versus private infrastructure ownership and financing; and (c) public perceptions about acceptable taxes, fees, and tolls.
• Workforce: preparing for the impacts on employment from the gradual increase in automation and providing case studies of agency efforts to attract and retain a diverse, multi-skilled workforce.

• Innovation: fostering cultures of innovation in transportation agencies and private firms, including documenting how such cultures can be built and sustained.

For transportation itself, society and individuals alike would benefit from a deeper understanding of

• How personal travel and access to the range of destinations that allow families and communities to thrive can serve or hamper individual and societal goals by providing or denying access to opportunities of all kinds.
• The many ways in which freight movement supports modern lifestyles and economic prosperity and how to improve its performance and working conditions for employees.
• The most cost-effective policies to minimize the social and environmental costs of the movement of people and goods.
• Overall system performance in providing, maintaining, and operating the infrastructure that makes the safe and efficient movement of people and goods possible.

There are important gaps in measuring, understanding, and translating existing knowledge about why and how transportation is important to individuals, communities, firms, and society at large (see the Appendix). Much of the engineering of transportation systems is well understood, but additional technological breakthroughs will be required to meet economic and climate goals while improving safety, public health, and equity. The economics of where firms locate and how they expand markets and control costs through transportation are fairly well established. However, the level of market competition across and between modes that is necessary for ensuring efficient pricing of goods receives much less attention, even as carriers in some modes appear to be consolidating in ways that may impede competition. Far less studied and understood than these examples are questions such as how travel affects personal growth and happiness and how individual aspirations can be aggregated to represent society as a whole. Improved understanding of these questions would inform public policy and help ensure that transportation leads to a thriving society.