AASHTO Journal - ATSSA Seeks Nat'l Work Zone Awareness Week Hosts

The American Traffic Safety Services Association is seeking state departments of transportation to host the main 2025 National Work Zone Awareness Week or NWZAW event, unless they have hosted in the last three years.

[Above photo by Missouri DOT]

ATSSA said that this annual campaign – which will be held April 15-19 in 2024 – highlights the risks to highway workers, motorists, and vehicle passengers in roadway work zones and that the state host’s role is to determine the year’s theme, design the annual poster, and plan the national kickoff event to promote work zone safety.

The Missouri Department of Transportation hosted the 2023 NWZAW kickoff event in the shade of the I-70 Westbound Missouri River Bridge project. Gloria Shepherd – executive director of the Federal Highway Administration – stressed that her agency “intends to use every program and funding option at our disposal to make where infrastructure repairs, maintenance, and construction are underway safer for workers and motorists alike.”

“The safety of highway workers and others on roads, bridges and highways across the country is FHWA’s number one priority,” she said in a statement at the time.

“Work zone safety is personal for us,” added MoDOT Director Patrick McKenna at the event. “It is about getting home safely to your family, to your friends, after every single shift every single time during your [transportation] career. There are lives on the line every day, in every state, in any given work zone people are dying. The decisions you make in work zones could be the difference between life and death, for our workers, yourself, and everyone you share the road with.”

ATSSA noted that applications to serve as state host for the 2025 NWZAW event are due by February 29 and must come from the public affairs office of a state DOT.

The NWZAW Executive Committee will select the state finalist and runner-up in March and both states will be announced at the April 2024 kickoff event hosted by Maryland.