The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials recently sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology – known as “OST-R” – regarding the agency’s efforts to form a national strategy for transportation digital infrastructure or TDI.
[Above photo by AASHTO]
AASHTO’s letter – which is in response to USDOT’s request for information on TDI originally published in the Federal Register on February 4 this year – explained that state departments of transportation “play a fundamental role” in advancing, operating, and maintaining both the physical and digital infrastructure necessary to support the nation’s multimodal transportation system.
As such, the development of a national TDI strategy “has the potential to greatly improve the reliability” of the many different technologies supporting that system, the group explained.
“Federal investment is critical to ensuring the interoperability of these technologies, the creation of a cohesive national data governance framework, and assurance that these technologies are deployed responsibly and effectively across our nation’s transportation system,” AASHTO said in its letter.
“Based on feedback from state DOT experts represented on AASHTO committees and disciplines, we recommend a definition of TDI that includes the integrated network of hardware, software, data systems, and communication networks that support physical infrastructure – and not just modelled digital infrastructure,” the organization added.
The group pointed to comments made by Seval Oz, senior advisor within the USDOT’s OST-R, during a panel discussion at the AASHTO 2026 Washington Briefing, about how the free-flow of data is key to unlocking full benefit if current and future transportation technologies.
“We appreciated [her] remarks when she said, ‘Data is king – it makes the feedback cycle work.’ To that end, AASHTO has identified data interoperability as a defining challenge of widescale TDI deployment,” the organization said.
“To achieve nationwide interoperability, we believe there is a need for unified data standards along with data exchange formats and data sharing protocols,” AASHTO noted.
“Federated data sharing should rely on common, open standards and distributed APIs that allow each state to maintain its own data systems, with national discoverability, quality transparency, and standards conformance. To support data integration and interoperability, state DOTs identified the need for more research to support the technological and organizational transitions from legacy systems to more modern technologies,” the group pointed out.
“AASHTO urges USDOT to leverage existing data standards and expand federal and state programs that are already implementing TDI,” the organization stressed. “Flexible funding to states would enable the deployment of scalable, real-world applications of digital infrastructure.”
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