Immediately following Auto Glass Week, AGSC president Mike Schenian and public affairs director Seth Maiman travelled to Louisville, Kentucky, to participate in the annual meeting of the Governor’s Highway Safety Association (GHSA), a 650-person conference attended by representatives of state and national safety groups. GHSA is a Washington, DC based association of the state highway safety offices inside of state governments across the nation. GHSA has designated AGSC as a Highway Safety Champion for its work in auto glass safety.
The 2022 GHSA Conference was titled “Traffic Safety in a Changing World” and featured presentations and seminars from officials of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and state highway offices. Amid a pandemic-era rise in traffic related deaths, presenters advocated for further adoption and advancement of the Safe System approach for preventing crashes and saving lives. The Safe System approach has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Transportation as the guiding paradigm to address roadway safety. The holistic and comprehensive approach focuses on both human mistakes AND human vulnerability and designs a system with many redundancies in place to protect everyone.
Safe Vehicles are one prong of the Safe System approach, along with Safe Roads, Safe Road Users, Safe Speed and Post-Crash Care. As safe windshields are an essential component of a safe vehicle, AGSC participates in such conferences to educate other safety advocates about the AGRSS Standard and teach best practices for auto glass replacement and repair.
“Working with our partners across the highway safety spectrum helps further the mission of AGSC. We spread the AGSC message about the safe installation of windshields, the AGRSS standard and calibration. We learned a lot from other organizations about how they reach the consumer to spread their pro-safety messages,” said Schenian. “With the GHSA conference coming right on the heels of Auto Glass Week, we had a lot of information regarding new and coming technologies to share with our safety partners.”