Welcome to the Regional Transport Research Conference 2024
Join us for a leading conference bringing together professionals across the region to address critical issues in transport. This event will feature sessions led by experts on innovative solutions, research, and discussions on pressing challenges in transport systems and mobility.
Background
Transportation is an individual activity that takes place in a communal space by communal means. So many individual trips by different modes with different start and end points overlapping, merging and diverging, sharing space, vehicles, and facilities at different times and places. It is a never-ending bubbling pot of conflicts and potential collisions.
The design, construction, implementation, and management of this multitude of conflicts is the realm of transportation and mobility professionals.
- What are the tools available?
- What solution is best for any given scenario?
- What type of environment needs to be created to maintain peaceful operations?
- How can technology be deployed to encourage positive outcomes?
It is challenging to identify a transport issue that doesn't have conflict management as a core objective, but practitioners often fail to look for synergies that will foster collaboration and sharing and encourage learning from experiences in other sectors or areas because of silos of specialisation that have been created to protect turf.
It is well known that transport is a derived demand that supports and facilitates activities in many other sectors. The destination is the real purpose of the trip undertaken, whether for leisure, education, employment, or any other reason, and improvements in transport services have a multiplier effect for productivity and the economy. Open dialogue about the barriers to operating an effective transport system, as viewed and experienced from different perspectives, will create avenues for learning, collaboration, and growth, in the sector and beyond.
Scope
For many people, the first thing that comes to mind, when asked about conflict in transport, is the issue of road safety and traffic collisions. However, the wider perspective involves an appreciation of conflict as being any scenario in which there is a difference that may or may not be resolved, whether at:
- the operating level
- the policy level
- within or between sectors
- where there are complementing or overlapping responsibilities
- cases of dependency and interdependency
The impacts of these conflicts may not cause physical damage as do traffic crashes, but the rifts and gaps that result are often sufficient to tangibly affect the desired outcome, in ways that may go unnoticed. Beyond the physical conflicts between objects (whether animate or inanimate) with mass, there are multiple dimensions and scenarios in which the potential for conflict exists.
The multivariate nature of transport requires balance to be struck between:
The extent to which
freedoms of individual
preference are
accommodated
The ways in which
travel takes place
Places to which
people travel
What happens
when they get there
Conference Structure
The conference will be held at the Jamaica Pegasus in New Kingston, Jamaica, from Wednesday, February 19 to Friday, February 21, 2025. Over the three-day period, participants will hear perspectives from panelists in different areas and learn from presentations across parallel tracks, covering a wide range of research topics. Researchers, practitioners, and students are encouraged to display their work in the poster session that will be ongoing throughout the event.
On the two days immediately preceding the conference, at the same location, interested individuals may attend the Caribbean Traffic Crash Symposium. This symposium will provide current and relevant updates on the technology being used in the investigation and reconstruction of road traffic crashes, with a special emphasis on event data recorders (black boxes).
Venue
The Jamaica Pegasus is centrally located in New Kingston at 81 Knutsford Boulevard, opposite Emancipation Park. For the greatest convenience of access to the conference sessions, participants may choose to book rooms at this location. Other nearby options in New Kingston and the surrounding area, including hotels, guest houses, and AirBnBs, are available. Participants are encouraged to explore accommodation options before making bookings.
The list of hotels below, located in the vicinity of New Kingston, is provided for convenience only. Participants should review and consider the available options and make their own hotel arrangements:
- Marriott Courtyard Kingston, 1 Park Close, Kingston 5
- Courtleigh Hotel & Suites, 85 Knutsford Boulevard, Kingston 5
- Altamont Court Hotel, 1-5 Altamont Crescent, Kingston 5
- S Hotel Kingston, 1 St. Lucia Avenue, Kingston 5
- AC Hotel, 38-42 Lady Musgrave Road, Kingston 5
- R Hotel, 2 Renfrew Road, Kingston 5
- Terra Nova All Suite Hotel, 17 Waterloo Road, Kingston 10