Longtime transportation industry veteran Kirk Steudle (seen above at right), the former director of the Michigan Department of Transportation, received the George S. Bartlett Award at the 2019 American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials annual meeting in St. Louis in recognition of his long and continuing service to the transportation industry.
[Above photo by Cathy Morrison/MoDOT.]
“This is an exciting time to be in transportation,” he said. “Our job now is to balance what’s possible 50 years from now – what’s ‘utopia’ – with what is possible next year, and how manage that 50 years in the middle.”
Established in 1931, the award annually recognizes an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to highway progress and is co-sponsored by ASAHTO, the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Lorie Tudor, deputy director and chief operating officer of the Arkansas Department of Transportation, received the Alfred E. Johnson Achievement award at the meeting in recognition of her organizational, technical, and analytical skills that – over a nearly four-decade career – almost single-handedly transformed how the agency identifies, evaluates, selects, develops, tracks, manages, advertises, and awards transportation projects.
“It means so much to me to win this award,” Tudor told the AASHTO Journal in an interview. “It’s very unexpected and one of the proudest moments of my life, to have all of my work over my career to be recognized like this. I am very humbled by it.”
Matthew Garrett, the recently-retired director of the Oregon Department of Transportation and one of the longest serving directors in the agency’s history, received the Thomas H. MacDonald Memorial Award in recognition of his many accomplishments during his 22-year career – including shepherding to passage one of the largest transportation funding measures ever in Oregon history and implementing the nation’s first operational per-mile road usage charge system.
The Missouri Department of Transportation received the Francis B. Francois Award for developing a data-driven analysis tool to evaluate and maximize the safety benefits of transportation projects.
AASHTO also handed out several 2019 President’s Transportation awards to highlight individuals and teams that performed exemplary service benefiting the transportation industry on either a regional or national basis. The winners include:
- William Cass, assistant commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Transportation for excellence in administration.
- The Idaho Department of Transportation for environmental excellence in relation to is US-12 Lochsa Revival project, along with a research excellence award for the unique solution developed to address the “swelling clay” of Elephant Butte.
- The Virginia Department of Transportation for performance excellence for its data- and technology-driven strategic guardrail management program.
- The Washington State Department of Transportation for the planning excellence of its Washington Ferries Planning Team.
AASHTO Annual Meeting
