The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) has presented its annual awards to three individuals and eight state departments of transportation (DOTs) for outstanding achievement in the field of transportation.
Presented last week at the AASHTO Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, the organization honored individuals and transportation departments for their contributions to the transportation community through a series of awards.
Former USDOT Deputy Secretary, Victor Mendez (below left), received the George S Bartlett Award, given jointly by AASHTO, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) and the Transportation Research Board (TRB), in recognition of an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to highway progress.A former director of Arizona DOT and AASHTO president, Mendez was appointed Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration in 2009, where he approved the launch of the Every Day Counts initiative to speed up highway project delivery.
The other awards and the honorees were:
• Thomas H MacDonald Award – John Njord (below center), former Utah DOT executive director, for outstanding service and contribution to highway engineering;
• Alfred E Johnson Achievement Award – Susan Shaw (below right) of Virginia DOT for an outstanding contribution in highway engineering and management;
• Francis B Francois Award for Innovation – Utah DOT’s Moab Peer-to-Peer Adaptive Signal Control System, which involved UDOT signal engineers developing a traffic control system using the latest technology to provide the most efficient signal timing in the heavily congested center of Moab.
The winners of the President’s Transportation Awards, by category, were:
• Administration – Missouri DOT, the Citizen’s Guide to Transportation Funding project team;
• Administration – Michigan DOT, the For-Hire Passenger Transportation Project team;
• Environment – Michigan DOT, the Interstate 75 Corridor Conservation Plan core team;
• Highways – Michigan DOT, Jack Rick, the University Region design squad and the I-96/US-23 Interchange Reconstruction Project team;
• Highway Traffic Safety – Idaho Transportation Department, the US 20 Thornton Interchange Saves Lives Project.
• Performance Excellence – Pennsylvania DOT, the Highly Automated Vehicle (H-A-V) senior leadership team;
• Public Transportation – Michigan DOT, Jonathan Loree, manager for the M-1 Rail (Q Line) Street Car Project.
“Every year it is AASHTO’s privilege to recognize the extraordinary people, projects, and programs that are making transportation safer and more reliable for everyone,” said Bud Wright, AASHTO’s executive director. “These honorees are truly remarkable innovators who demonstrate the kind of can-do spirit America will need to keep up with the transformational technologies emerging in transportation today.”
