Impactful Research Award

The 2025 Impactful Research Award was presented on January 7, 2025

Award Description

The Impactful Research Award shall be given in recognition of a project that has a proven positive impact on the transportation and/or land use decision-making field that meets the majority of the following criteria.

  • Has been broadly adopted or implemented in practice
  • Improved the approach, skills, capability of transportation and land use decision-making process;
  • Whose methodology, formula, design, etc. are freely accessible to the public;
  • Promotes multilateral collaboration; and
  • Advances the travel analysis field for the public good.

Nominees are considered by a three-person award committee and forwarded to the Zephyr Board for approval. Awards are made at the TRB Annual Meeting.

2025 Awardee

Congratulations to the winner of the 2025 Impactful Research Award: R5 Team

R5 is an open-source multi-modal routing engine developed by the Conveyal team, with wrapper libraries (R5R, R5Py) developed by others. The principal developers are Matthew Bhagat-Conway, Anson Stewart, and Andrew Byrd. Rafael Pereira made valuable contributions to the R5R project. Many others have contributed to the R and Python interfaces to R5. In an independent benchmark, R5R was the fastest approach to calculate OD matrices and accessibility metrics. R5, R5R, and R5Py have received contributions from 14, 11, and 5 developers, respectively. Combined, R5R and R5Py have been downloaded more than 1 million times.

Collectively, these tools are broadly implemented in practice and making a positive impact on transportation and land-use decision-making. For example, the newly released Caltrans System Investment Strategy relies on a suite of climate-focused metrics to evaluate transportation investments consistently, including access to work and non-work destinations calculated with cloud-based tools built on R5. Other state DOTs, metropolitan planning organizations, and transit operators/authorities around the world use R5 scenario planning tools to assess how project alternatives can improve access to destinations and transportation equity. R5 also powers recent high-profile analyses and datasets from leading research and advocacy organizations including the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory (Access in Appalachia), TransitCenter (Equity Dashboard, via R5Py), IPEA (Acesso a Oportunidades, via r5r), and Statistics Canada (Spatial Access Measures across Canada, via R5R).

The 2025 Impactful Research Award Committee was:

  • Matthew Bhargat-Conway
  • Pedro Camargo
  • Suzanne Childress
  • Ali Shamshiripour
  • Sarah Sun

Board Facilitator: Xinbo Mi, Jason Hawkins

Presenter at the 2025 TRB Annual Meeting Reception: Jason Hawkins

Received the award on the behalf of the project team:

  • Andrew Byrd
  • Anson Stewart, PhD
  • Trevor Gerhardt

Award Recipients