AASHTO Journal reports, the board of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) last week elected its slate of officers for 2024-2025. Garrett Eucalitto, commissioner of the Connecticut DOT, was elected president. He assumed that role in September when he began filling the unexpired term of former president Craig Thompson. The board selected Georgia DOT Commissioner Russell McMurry as its 2024-2025 vice president.
“Under Eucalitto’s direction, AASHTO will focus on ‘Centering Safety’ on every state DOT action, harnessing a ‘whole of AASHTO’ approach to address the safety crisis plaguing roadways in communities across the country. This approach will specifically emphasize:
- Safer Communities: Understanding community values, engaging residents, and determining which safety improvements work in specific situations in each community. Centering Safety for communities means implementing Complete Streets policies and deploying proven safety countermeasures that will help create safer communities.
- Safer Users: States continue to invest in efforts to combat and address unsafe driver behavior, yet the nation has seen an increase in speeding, impairment, distractions, and other reckless behaviors since 2020. Centering Safety means using infrastructure treatments, speed management, advanced technology, enhanced enforcement, better data collection and analysis, and more effective education to improve safety.
- Safer Workers: State DOT employees, transportation workers, and emergency responders, are facing increased risks and disregard for ‘Slow Down, Move Over’ laws due to speed, recklessness, impairment, and distraction. Centering Safety for our nation’s transportation workers means providing more and better safety equipment, increased efforts to train response teams in traffic incident management, and more widely available mental health resources.
Eucalitto will also focus his presidential year on the reauthorization of a federal surface transportation bill to succeed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. To do this, states will be encouraged to tell the stories of transportation projects that are improving quality of life in communities across the country. These stories will highlight the need for continued investment.”