Midwestern State DOT Projects Win Regional Awards

August 29, 2025

Eleven state department of transportation projects from Illinois, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin won regional honors in the 2025 America’s Transportation Awards competition.

[Above photo by the Illinois DOT] 

Selected from 21 projects submitted by eight states in the Mid-America Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials or MAASTO region, those entries are part of 113 nominations from 35 state DOTs in this year’s overall competition.

Image by AASHTO

Sponsored by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the America’s Transportation Awards competition highlights transportation projects that deliver meaningful community benefits.

Projects are judged in four categories – Quality of Life/Community Development, Operations Excellence, Best Use of Technology & Innovation, and Safety – demonstrating transportation’s vital role for drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, rail users, and transit riders alike. 

All nominated projects first compete at the regional level against projects of their own size: “Small” (projects costing up to $10 million), “Medium” (projects costing between $10 million and $100 million), and “Large” (projects costing more than $100 million).

AASHTO’s Jim Tymon. Photo by AASHTO.

“The America’s Transportation Awards shine a spotlight on the vital projects state DOTs deliver for their communities to enhance safety, expand mobility for users, deliver a better quality of life for residents and visitors, and keep our economy moving,” said Jim Tymon, AASHTO’s executive director, in a statement.

“The America’s Transportation Awards competition continues to show us that state DOTs are able to transform communities in a variety of ways,” he said. “And as Congress works toward a new federal surface transportation bill, lawmakers need to only look at the tangible benefits that states deliver to their customers through examples like these winners to see why robust federal funding to states is so important.” 

This year, AASHTO also asked nominees about the impact of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act or IIJA on their projects to showcase the importance of federal investment in the nation’s transportation systems.

Many of the MAASTO regional nominees were directly impacted by this historic law, highlighting the vital role the next federal surface transportation law will play in continuing the progress in making communities safer and providing mobility and access for all. 
This year’s winning MAASTO projects are: 

Now that the regional competitions are over, the top three scoring projects in each region will advance to the Top 12. Those projects will be revealed in early September.

Those standout projects will then compete for two national honors in the 2025 America’s Transportation Awards. The Grand Prize will be chosen by an independent panel of judges, while the People’s Choice Award will be decided through online public voting.

Each winning project will receive $10,000 to donate to a scholarship fund or charitable cause of their choice and AASHTO will reveal both winners at its annual meeting in November 2025 in Salt Lake City.

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