The 2025 Exceptional Technical Achievement Award was presented on January 7, 2025
The Exceptional Technical Achievement Award shall be given in recognition of a project that has a potential for a positive impact on the transportation and/or land use decision-making field that meets the majority of the following criteria.
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.
Congratulations to the winner of the 2025 Exceptional Technical Achievement Award: OSMnx!
In order to locate travel as it moves between locations, travel models require an explicit representation of the transportation system. OpenStreetMap has long been a wonderful resource for urban planners: an open source mapping tool. But it could not support travel models, because it was not a routable network. Dr. Geoff Boeing solved this problem through his tool OSMnx, which has opened the door to using OSM for travel models. OSMnx is an open-source Python package that extracts an arbitrary selection of OSM data and creates a routable Python networkx object.
OSMnx began as Geoff’s Ph.D. dissertation and was first released in 2016. To date, it has been downloaded more than 700,000 times, received direct contributions from 72 developers (and many more on various derived versions of OSMnx), and is a requirement for over 500 other Python packages. The most recent version, OSMnx 2.0, was released in November 2024 with Geoff continuing his role as the primary developer. In addition to routing, OSMnx provides functionalities for working with urban amenities/points of interest, building footprints, transit stops, elevation data, street orientations, and speed/travel time.This tool has been used by academics, planning agencies, and consultants to perform transportation analysis and as a basis for other software tools.
The 2025 Exceptional Technical Achievement Award Committee was:
Board Facilitator: Xinbo Mi, Jason Hawkins
Presenter at the 2025 TRB Annual Meeting Reception: Jason Hawkins
Note: In 2023, the award updated/clarified to focus on a project.