At the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials 2025 Spring Meeting in Hartford, CT, a knowledge session outlined a range of potential strategies to boost safety for all road users – from motorists and roadway workers to pedestrians and bicyclists.
[Above photo by AASHTO]
Jeff Cleland, senior manager of state transportation public policy for Amazon – the session’s sponsor – moderated a panel that included Garrett Eucalitto, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Transportation and AASHTO president; Tracy Larkin Thomason, director of the Nevada Department of Transportation; Erich Teoh, director of statistical services for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and the Highway Loss Data Institute; and Chuck DeWeese, president of Connecting Clients Consulting and a consultant for Responsibility.org.
Connecticut DOT’s Eucalitto referred to the “Centering Safety” emphasis areas of his one-year term as AASHTO’s president to guide the discussion.
“It’s focused on three different aspects of ‘centering safety,’” he explained. “The first is on communities and understanding that every community is different. It’s not going to be one size fits all. We need to go into the community, walk the community, understand that community and what they really need to improve safety in that community.”
The next aspect is improving safety for roadway workers, using technology, better training, and better equipment, Eucalitto said. “We’re also testing anything we can as well because we need to improve safety for them,” he noted.
The final piece is improving safety for roadway users – particularly of those operating vehicles. “How can we get people to slow down? How can we get people to drive sober? How can we get people to put their distractions away? Those are the issues we are tackling in this space,” Eucalitto explained.
Nevada DOT’s Thomason added that improving communications not only between roadway users and state departments of transportation, but communication between state DOTs from different regions as well as emergency response personnel, tow truck operators, state police, and others is paramount to improving the overall roadway safety picture.
“It’s a much broader way of talking about safety,” she explained. “Fundamental to safety is how to communicate. But are you connected so you can communicate? And if you are connected, are those connections interoperable? If there is no cell phone coverage, is satellite communication available? That’s my messaging for safety.”
Thomason stressed that there “is very little redundancy in any of the major communication systems” state DOTs use to communicate with one another and the public, as well as emergency responders and law enforcement.
“Look at winter operations all across I-80,” she said. “When there’s drifting in Wyoming and [the highway] is closed, you need to tell motorists that all the way back to Nebraska. Because they only have about three left [turns] to get off the freeway or else they’re just stuck there.”
Teoh with IIHS emphasized that despite a wide variety of technological advances that have taken place for motor vehicles over the last few years, the need for infrastructure-focused safety tactics won’t be going away anytime soon.
“So, we’ve got to remember that when we [add new technological] things to vehicles, it takes a very long time for that implementation piece to catch up. We just have to understand the timing,” he said.
“Take electronic stability control; it is on 80 percent of vehicles now. But we still have a significant number of lane departure crashes,” Teoh noted. “So even as we have all these great vertical technologies, even as they become more and more ubiquitous, people are still going to run off the road. It will still be important to have guardrails, to keep trees away from the side of the road. These things, they complement each other; all of these countermeasures.”
He added that changes to the physical mass of vehicles themselves is also having an impact on roadway safety – and not always a good one.
“Bicyclist fatalities are at a record high for the second year in a row now and pedestrians are now pretty close to a record high,” he said. “And when we look at the average curb weight of new vehicles that keeps increasing as well. That means we are just going to be operating in a world of bigger vehicles for the foreseeable future. That’s why it’s really important that we do what we can to protect all vulnerable road users.”
DeWeese noted that, after 35 years in the roadway safety sector, he believes the industry already has the answers it needs to solve these problems.
“The real question is, do we have the willpower to solve the problems? That’s kind of the big question,” he stressed. “For example, our drug impaired driving numbers are going through the roof – and we’re talking about multi-substance impairment, not just alcohol. To that point, in 2022, 59 percent of drug positive driver fatalities involved a driver who tested positive for drugs but not alcohol, while 41 percent were positive for both alcohol and at least one other drug.”
One of the main issues, DeWeese said, when it comes to impairment – which, along with speed, is the main driver of roadway crash fatalities and injuries – is that “we don’t have good data on what the real scope of the drug driving problem is.”
And if you don’t know what’s causing the impairment, he stressed, you can’t correctly treat the overall addiction issue that leads to impaired driving in the first place.
“If you don’t know what’s causing them to be impaired, how can you get them through the system without recidivism? That is a problem we need to address,” DeWeese said. “And data will help us do that.”
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