Rebecca Brewster to retire after three decades leading ATRI research

By Amara Osei

Rebecca Brewster will step down as ATRI’s president and chief operating officer in February, ending a tenure of more than three decades marked by bottleneck research that helped prompt a nearly 25% truck-speed gain in Chicago.

She joined in 1993 when it was called ATA Foundation. The American Transportation Research Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with American Trucking Associations, adopted that name in 2001, eight years later, to clarify its mission. State and local governments have used its data to guide congestion decisions, while federal agencies and Congress have weighed its findings in regulations and legislation.

What changed while Brewster led ATRI?

The Jane Byrne Interchange near downtown Chicago, formerly the Circle Interchange, topped ATRI’s annual truck-bottleneck list for three consecutive years. After a lengthy overhaul of the freeway junction, ATRI recorded a nearly 25% improvement in truck speeds.

Brewster believes the rankings have pushed states to address congestion rather than leave trucks inside it. She said the Byrne project produced a positive outcome for trucking and every motorist crossing the interchange. For carriers and forwarders, that is the useful part: better truck speeds can reduce delay and improve schedule reliability on dense urban routes.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s hours-of-service rules supplied a harder research problem. Major changes in the early 2000s marked the first overhaul in decades, and later revisions kept ATRI’s researchers busy.

“We demonstrated through empirical research that there were challenges with some of those changes, and that got the attention of Congress and it got attention from FMCSA and ultimately led to changes that were positive for the trucking industry in those rules,” Brewster said.

For shippers, the commercial stakes sit in rosters, available driver hours and usable capacity. For forwarders, dependable hours-of-service analysis can make transit promises more credible. Rules written from imperfect evidence hardly qualify as a triumph of forecasting.

How did a policy analyst become ATRI’s president?

Brewster graduated from Wofford College with an English degree and entered transport research without a master plan. During an economic downturn after college, she found work through a temporary employment service at Moen’s private fleet, where she audited team driver logs for the bathroom-fixture manufacturer.

She then became director of public and governmental affairs at the Cary Chamber of Commerce in North Carolina. A few years later, while visiting a friend in Atlanta, she spotted a newspaper advertisement seeking an ATA Foundation public policy analyst. The selection process was refreshingly old-school: she applied and got the job.

At 29, Brewster reasoned that few people combined trucking-industry experience with government affairs. She later rose from policy analyst to president after several years at the organization, and said she had loved every minute of the unintended route.

Which issues kept moving up the agenda?

ATRI’s widely cited analysis of the trucking industry’s top issues began as a one-time attempt to take the industry’s pulse. It became an annual release, drawing responses from commercial drivers, motor carriers, law enforcement and others while letting readers track shifting concerns.

The report covers numerous subjects, with recurring concerns including:

• Truck parking
• Lawsuit abuse
• Economic conditions

It became one of the industry’s most anticipated annual releases, which is substantial praise for a document that began without sequel plans. For carriers and forwarders, it offers a shared view of operating pressure rather than a single dashboard.

ATRI also studied women in trucking, who represent 4.1% of truck drivers, or about one in 25. Brewster said its research found women drivers safer on average than their male counterparts, alongside documented barriers to entering and staying in the profession.

The study included an action plan for fleets, commercial driver license schools and women drivers, with recommendations centered on recruitment and especially retention. Brewster said ATRI’s crash predictor indicates broader safety gains, providing fleets with a labor argument as well as a safety case.

What does this change for carriers and forwarders?

Page Siplon will succeed Brewster as ATRI’s leader in February. She advised him to focus on nurturing the research team, describing it as unmatched. Siplon said he intends to “futureproof the industry,” with three priorities:

• Artificial intelligence in trucking
• Autonomous trucks
• Fuel-cost management

Nothing in the announced agenda changes hours-of-service compliance or daily dispatch rules. It does signal where ATRI will seek evidence that could shape future policy and operating choices: AI adoption, autonomous freight movement and the cost of keeping trucks powered.

Brewster has seen technology move from paper driver logs to electronic logging, forward-facing and driver-facing cameras, and tools for managing operational costs. She regards those changes as positive, even if she could not have projected the industry’s current position when she started.

Her retirement will not necessarily keep her away from the road. She and her husband plan to revisit familiar destinations as tourists, without a name badge or a PowerPoint, and sees that itinerary as overdue.

The practical measure of the transition will be whether Siplon’s AI, autonomy and fuel-cost research improves driver productivity and preserves trucking capacity as the technology mix changes.