My First Conference at Citian: Recapping GHSA 2026 in Minneapolis

Last week, I traveled to Minneapolis for the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) 2026 Annual Meeting, joining state highway safety leaders, law enforcement, researchers, and advocacy groups from across the country. I came in ready to learn the landscape, and I left with a much clearer picture of how differently traffic safety gets tackled from state to state.

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Distracted Driving, Reimagined

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One of the sessions that stuck with me most tackled distracted driving through scenario-based brainstorming, pushing the room past the usual "put the phone down" messaging. My favorite idea to come out of it: Enlisting Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen as the face of an active anti-distracted-driving campaign. Nothing official, just a brainstorm, but it's a good reminder that some of the best safety messaging borrows credibility from culture rather than another statistic on a slide.

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A Surprising Case for Driver's Ed

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A session on driver safety programming surfaced a data point I didn't expect: people who get licensed later in life show a higher correlation with crashes, largely tied to skipping mandatory driver's education. It runs counter to the assumption that older, more mature new drivers are automatically safer ones, and it's a strong argument for keeping formal training in place rather than treating it as a box to check.

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Comparing Notes Over Lunch

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Some of the best learning happened off the agenda. During meals, I sat with Highway Safety Office staff, comparing notes on how differently a state on the other side of the country approaches the same safety problems we work on every day. Conversations like that one were a big part of why GHSA was so valuable: the sessions set the agenda, but the hallway and lunch-table conversations are where you really feel how uneven safety programming is state to state.

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Rising Fatalities, Even Where Programming Is Strong

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A theme that came up again and again across states: even agencies with well-established, well-funded safety programming are still seeing fatality rates climb. Nobody in the room had a tidy explanation, but there's real, active work underway to understand why. It was a grounding reminder that good programming alone isn't the whole answer, and that the industry is still very much in problem-solving mode.

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Where the Advocacy Conversation Got Real

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Both AAA and Responsibility.org used their platform at GHSA to push the federal government on two specific asks: build out a real database for tracking pedestrian incidents around work zones, and establish a national drug-involved crash data collection system. Right now, neither exists in a form that gives states or the feds a reliable, complete picture.

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Citian supports both asks. Better federal data makes every state's safety program stronger, and it's exactly the kind of shift our platform exists to support. But we also see, every day, why this is harder than it sounds: most states simply don't have the data infrastructure today to report this kind of information to the federal government on a regular, consistent basis. Crash and roadway data is still fragmented across systems, agencies, and formats in a lot of the country. Asking for a new federal reporting standard is the easy part; building the underlying pipes that let states actually feed it, without a mountain of manual work, is the real challenge. That gap between the ask and the infrastructure to meet it is exactly where we spend most of our time.

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Off the Clock: Vikings, the Fair, and Minnesota Hospitality

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Outside the sessions, Minneapolis delivered. I made it to my first game at the Vikings stadium and caught the Minnesota State Fair, one of the largest in the country, which more than lived up to the hype. Good food, good energy, and a fun way to close out a week that was otherwise pretty heads-down.

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The Takeaway

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Coming out of GHSA 2026, I have a much clearer picture of how traffic safety is being tackled state by state across the country, the wins, the gaps, and the open questions everyone is still chasing. Looking forward to the next one.