But we haven’t always said whose lives we’re talking about.

It may surprise drivers that about 7 out of 8 people who die in work zone accidents are drivers or their passengers, according to 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The Numbers Show Our Progress

That means the people inside vehicles who pass through our work zones face more danger, statistically speaking, than our crew members — this despite the fact our crew members spend hour after hour exposed to passing traffic.

These numbers reflect the progress we’ve made to make working conditions safer for our crews. All the training sessions, awareness campaigns, and innovations have worked together to make our work zones safer than they were a generation ago.

But they also show we have more work to do — both for our crews and for the people who travel through them each day.

Let’s Make it Clear: We Want Everyone to Get Home Safe

When we take our message of safety to the general public during this month’s National Work Zone Awareness Week, let’s make sure we tell drivers we’re working to protect them as well as our work crews from danger.

National Work Zone Awareness Week is April 21-25. This year’s theme, “Respect the Zone so we All Get Home,” reflects this goal: That everyone who enters a work zone exits our work zone safely and makes it back home that day.

How Can We Get Involved in NWZAW?

The North Carolina Department of Transportation hosts this year’s National Work Zone Awareness Week. North Carolina’s DOT will host an official kick-off event on Tuesday, April 22, but there’s no need to travel to the Tarheel state to join this important campaign.

In fact, we encourage all InfraStripe company leaders and employees — as well as family members and friends of anyone who’s connected to our industry — to help us raise awareness.

Here’s how:

On Wednesday, April 23: Go Orange Day

Wear your orange attire on Wednesday, April 23, to show your support for work zone safety. It’s OK to wear as much orange as you own, even if the shades don’t quite match.

Decked out in orange, you’ll be easy to see, and someone may even ask what’s up with all the orange? This is good. It creates a chance to talk about the fact that hundreds of people, most of them drivers or passengers in cars, die in work zones each year.

Be sure to post your orange-clad selfies or group pictures online with the hashtag #Orange4Safety and #NWZAW.

On Thursday, April 24: Social Media Storm

Thursday is our day to flood social media with messages about work zone safety. Use the hashtags #NWZAW and #WorkZoneSafety to join the national conversation between 9 am to 4 pm Eastern Time.

We encourage everyone in our InfraStripe family to share on their company and personal social media pages. The more we post, the more likely someone will pay attention to our messages about work zone safety.

This is another good time to point out this year’s theme, “Respect the Zone so we All Get Home.”

On Friday, April 25: Moment of Silence

We encourage every InfraStripe crew and team member to take a moment of silence on Friday, April 25, to remember those who have died in work zones. This memorial includes photos of some who died in 2024 work zone accidents.

The Week Begins with Training Day Monday, April 21

Before the awareness campaigns gear up each year, National Work Zone Awareness Week begins quietly, with a day of company-sponsored safety training. Companies throughout the nation will stand down from their projects for a few hours, or for the entire day, to talk about safety.

Along with providing valuable training, this special day sets the tone for National Work Zone Awareness Week, showing safety in our work zones starts with us, the infrastructure professionals who set up and operate work zones.

Your Voice Will Amplify Our Important Message

Awareness campaigns like National Work Zone Awareness Week combine all our voices into one voice to share an essential message. Adding your voice and your online presence will make our voice louder by putting our message in front of more people.

Get out your orange clothes, start thinking about your social media posts, and be ready to have a conversation about work zone safety, to tell everyone how to “Respect the Zone so we All Get Home.”

The post Making Sure Everybody — Workers and Work Zone Visitors — Gets Home Safely appeared first on InfraStripe.

It’s not our imagination. In 2024 alone:

• catastrophic floods washed away communities in the Southeast and Upper Midwest
• horrendous fires blazed in the West and Southwest
• multiple outbreaks of tornadoes devastated communities throughout the nation, including some as far north as Chicago and New York City

This list could go on.

And already this year, wind- and drought-fueled fires have wrecked communities in Southern California as winter storms iced the Gulf Coast.

This volatile weather has been especially tough on our transportation infrastructure. Extreme floods have washed away vital Interstate highways, requiring months, or more, of rebuilding. For example, crews are still hard at work rebuilding Interstate 40 in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene’s devastation back in September.

Why has 21st century weather been so hard on our roads and bridges? Here’s one reason: The structure undergirding some of our busiest corridors was laid in the mid-20th century. In some cases, the infrastructure is even older, dating to the 1920s and 1930s.

Engineers in that era couldn’t anticipate the relentless climate chaos we now experience, so they couldn’t build the best roads for 21st century conditions.

Today we have more knowledge. We know today’s weather patterns, of course, and we know the additional pressures climatologists expect in the decades ahead. Our engineers can build a highway system with 22nd century travelers in mind.

Today’s road builders also have more versatile methods than their counterparts from earlier generations. For example, we can build roads higher off the ground. We can use climate and geologic data to find less vulnerable routes for new roads. New building methods can also divert more water through larger culverts and drainage ditches.

Plus, a new type of permeable pavement can relieve the burden on drains and culverts by absorbing instead of diverting rainwater and melting snow.

At InfraStripe, we connect travelers to highway driving patterns by providing the industry’s best pavement marking, traffic control devices, and traffic safety solutions. In other words, our companies create the user experience for our nation’s millions of highway travelers.

As we build infrastructure for 22nd century travelers, we will continue to embrace newer, more durable traffic control and safety solutions. This could mean using generative AI to help plan projects, building traffic patterns with driverless cars in mind, or embracing technology that doesn’t exist yet.

In any case, our goal will always remain the same: to improve safety for anyone who travels on our nation’s roads.

The post Let’s Build a Road System for 22nd Century Weather appeared first on InfraStripe.

Other inventions get less attention, but their impact on the world can be just as powerful. In fact, they can save lives.

For example, the inventor Granville T. Woods made the world safer by enhancing and adapting existing inventions. He likely saved many lives in the process. This Black History Month we’re celebrating Woods’ career by highlighting two of his innovations.

The Multiplex Telegraph Device

Woods was born in 1856, nearly a decade before the Civil War and Emancipation ended slavery in the United States. Though never enslaved himself, he came of age as segregation and racial inequality tightened their grip on the nation.

Woods’ family couldn’t afford formal education, so Woods educated himself by working in steel mills and on steamships. As a young adult, he returned to his native Ohio to work for the railroad that connected Dayton with the rural towns of southeastern Ohio, along what is now U.S. 35.

Woods’ railroad work likely inspired the first invention we’d like to highlight, his Multiplex Telegraph Device.

The Multiplex Telegraph allowed moving trains to communicate with train dispatchers by tapping into the telegraph lines that already ran beside train tracks. The device used static electricity from the train to generate a magnetic field.

This was a huge step for transportation safety. Before Woods’ invention, trains could communicate with dispatchers only when someone on board could see the station’s signs and flags. The Multiplex Telegraph likely prevented collisions by allowing stations and train conductors to communicate while in transit.

We say “likely” because nobody kept statistics on collisions that didn’t happen and passengers who didn’’ die. Like we said above, innovations like Woods’ tended to unfold in the background where they were often invisible to the passengers they helped.

The Power Pickup Device

Later in his career, after opening a machine shop in New York City, Woods helped make mass transit in urban centers safer. Most urban streetcars and commuter trains in the late 19th century drew power from cables strung above rail lines.

After the Blizzard of 1888 wreaked havoc on above-ground power cables, New York City transit leaders wanted to create track-level power supply using what we now call a “third rail.”

Woods’ Power Pickup Device, installed on the bottom of train engines to create contact between the train and the power supply, helped advance third rail technology, making track-level power a standard power distribution method.

Track-level power was easier to run through tunnels, so third rail technology was essential to the development of New York City’s subway system which opened in 1904 and continues to use third rail power today. Ultimately, Woods’ Power Pickup Device helped make transit safer by helping the city separate pedestrians from commuter trains in most parts of the city.

The Power Pickup Device and Multiplex Telegraph Device were among almost 60 patents Woods registered before his death in 1910.

Through his work, Woods changed society’s expectations about safety. Most of us travel differently in the 21st century, but at InfraStripe, we’re still pursuing the same goal: making travel safer by changing our culture’s expectations.

The post A Black History Month Celebration of Granville T. Woods appeared first on InfraStripe.

A lot has changed since you left the Tar Heel state. You’ve traveled more than 1,600 miles, crossed the bulk of the North American continent, and climbed to a mile above sea level. You’re no longer driving beneath pines and oaks. Instead, you see fewer trees and thinner foliage, and those Rocky Mountains — what a dramatic backdrop!

But some things look the same: Like the yield signs you saw while merging onto I-70 and the green signs mounted above the highway. The color and style of the markings on the pavement look the same, too.

This, of course, is not a coincidence. The transportation industry follows a set of standards that allow drivers to follow the same rules across the country. Even if you’d landed in Honolulu, half a world away, these standards would have guided you around the Big Island without having to learn a new system.

It seems simple enough, right? Just make the roads, signs, and pavement markings look the same across the country?

Well, like a lot of things that seem simple, highway standards aren’t. In fact, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or MUTCD, which defines these standards, is about 1,100 pages long. The table of contents alone, for the current edition of the MUTCD, takes up more than 30 pages.

Turns out creating a simple system requires a lot of detailed work.

MUTCD standards regulate every imaginable scenario a traveler could navigate on an American roadway. How do you mark bike lanes and rail crossings? Where should you place junction signs as drivers approach an intersection? How do you set up crosswalks? MUTCD has an answer.

Because of MUTCD, any work done by any contractor in any state syncs up with the national system.

These standards continue to evolve and respond to different travel conditions. The very first edition of the MUTCD, which came out in 1935, didn’t address every travel condition we face on today’s roads. Vehicles and vehicle travel have changed a lot over the past 90 years.

But across all eleven editions of MUTCD, these rules and regulations have served a single purpose: Safety.

Standard traffic control devices communicate with drivers on a subconscious level. Standards direct traffic without drivers knowing they’re being directed. This allows drivers to pay more attention to the behavior of other vehicles and to better plan ahead for their next turn or stop.

If contractors didn’t follow these standards, drivers might have to adjust to a new system every time they cross state lines or leave an airport in a different major city.

Our InfraStripe family of companies performs the highest quality MUTCD-compliant infrastructure work in 29 states plus the District of Columbia. We’re proud to help uphold this standard of safety everywhere we work.

The post Across our Nation, MUTCD Standards Create Safety appeared first on InfraStripe.

Now, our modern highway systems make connecting across long distances easier and cheaper than ever for consumers and companies alike. This is true year round, but we see more evidence this time of year as people shop for gifts, gather for holiday events, and receive more packages from delivery services.

Our federal, state, and local roads serve as the circulatory system for all this shopping, gathering, and shipping, fueling the world’s biggest economy. Our paved surfaces connect our nation’s 300 or so water ports (and its approximately 5,000 airports) with practically all of our 145 million different private residences.

It’s a remarkable engineering feat when we stop to think about it. Usually, people don’t think much of it. 20th century Americans wove roads into the fabric of our society, making them a normal part of life. Now, in the 21st century, even our oldest citizens have lived their entire lives in a nation with highway standards. Highways feel like a birthright for Americans.

Of course, we know our highway infrastructure system isn’t perfect. It’s always a work in progress. That’s one reason our company exists: to create a culture of constant improvement in our industry. But, just for a moment, try to imagine this holiday season without reliable roads that adhere to national standards. Can you imagine traveling for the holidays without bridges to span every creek and proper grades around every curve?

This holiday season, people in Western North Carolina and other Appalachian communities, which are only a couple hours west of our corporate offices in Charlotte, can imagine that kind of world. They’re living it. Hurricane Helene’s flooding earlier this fall set highway travel back decades. Contractors from throughout the nation are busy restoring this region’s vital roadways.

This regional setback is an anomaly in our travel culture. It’s abnormal, and this reflects the general reliability of our travel routes and the success our culture has accomplished building them.

So, this holiday season, we at InfraStripe invite everyone to take a moment to look back and appreciate the modern convenience of roads and their ability to connect us with the people we care about.

Knowing where we came from and what has driven our success will help us see where we’re going: A future with higher standards for safety while continuing to connect people, grow, and perform the best work in the market.

At holiday time and throughout the year, those are our values at InfraStripe. Happy holidays and safe travels to everyone!

The post A Holiday Pause to Appreciate Seamless Highway Movement appeared first on InfraStripe.

We’re thankful for:

A Society that Cares About Safety

Not everyone in our society can meet their basic needs, especially in regions affected by this fall’s violent weather. Our hearts go out to anyone who is struggling to provide food, shelter, and warmth, and we encourage everyone who can to donate to relief organizations.

Having basic needs met gives people, companies, and our society at large the freedom to think about higher level needs. Higher level needs include our purpose, our relationships, and our plans for the future.

Our purpose at InfraStripe is to improve safety throughout the transportation sector by creating a culture that expects safer conditions. We’re thankful for the freedom to focus on this goal.

Chances to Improve Safety Every Day

Every day, our InfraStripe family of companies works on road projects across the continental U.S. Every day, these projects give us a chance to build relationships and to interact with other key players in the infrastructure industry.

Interacting with such a variety of public and private transportation stakeholders gives us a platform to talk about safety and to share our company’s other core values. It also gives us a way to learn from others who care about the safety of travelers and construction workers alike. We’re grateful for this cross-continental collaboration.

Having Tools like Standards to Rely On

In previous centuries, one company working across a geographical expanse the size of the continental U.S. would have faced a tough challenge we don’t have to think about. Lack of industry standards.

Because of standards developed in the 20th century, we can count on comparable lane widths and travel directions, standard types of signage, consistent paint colors, and even gas pump diameters designed to fit our vehicles. These standards didn’t arise accidentally. People in previous generations had to establish them. We’re thankful for such thoughtful forebears.

Working With so Many Great People

We do excellent infrastructure work in all of our markets, and we’re proud of that. Providing excellent work is part of who we are as a company. But we’re also proud to be building relationships with customers, employees, and other infrastructure companies.

Building these relationships helps us contribute to our nation’s culture of safety, and it helps us perform and grow as a company. Every satisfied customer, and every employee who’s happy on the job, grows InfraStripe.

Providing More Stability in our Communities

People who work in our industry earn better-than-average wages. We’re thankful to be a place where so many skilled workers can find meaningful work.

Most of our companies frequently welcome new talent to their teams. Providing a place for people to learn and grow in a growing profession contributes to our society in many important ways —  including helping people meet their basic needs and, we hope, giving them the freedom to enjoy life and plan for the future.

We wish everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving!

The post Five Ways We’re Thankful this November appeared first on InfraStripe.

But most of our readers already know all about this. So this year we want to use Careers in Construction Month differently. We want to explore what we in particular, as the InfraStripe family of companies, can offer career seekers. How are we different from other infrastructure companies? How do we attract and keep the best team members?

In other words, what should our recruitment ads say about us as a company?

That Our Safer Work Zones Keep Workers Safer

New and veteran team members need to know their employer cares about their safety. They need to know their employer won’t put workers at risk to meet a deadline or to save money.

Safety is the first of InfraStripe’s four core values. It’s the first topic we stress with every new hire. By growing safer we can attract and retain team members who can focus on their job while knowing they won’t have to stand alone defending safe practices. They’ll be part of a company that insists on safety.

That We Prioritize Our Employees’ Well-being

We believe that creating a supportive work environment goes beyond providing a paycheck. That’s why we offer a comprehensive benefits package that underscores our commitment to our employees’ long-term health, well-being, and financial security.

This includes medical, vision, and dental coverage to keep our team members and their families healthy, as well as paid time off (PTO) and company holidays to ensure a healthy work-life balance. Additionally, we offer a 401k plan with company matching to help our team members plan for their future.

That We Offer Ways to Grow within the Company

We expect our new hires, and our existing team members, to become experts at their jobs. We also want them to know their current job isn’t the ceiling for their career. We encourage all staff members to start thinking about their next job within the company and to work with their supervisors to achieve their career goals. From there, we provide the tools, training, and support our employees need to reach their next career milestone.

When a team member grows into a next-level job in the company, we get the chance to reinvest in our people. Our core values as a company include developing our people.

That We Do the Best Work in the Market

Employee reviews have their place in any workforce, but we also like to measure employee performance through another metric: the satisfaction of our customers. Thinking this way gives our new hires and experienced crew members clear performance goals to meet.

Satisfying customers means we’ve excelled at a variety of phases of our work, including the planning and execution of the job and the way we communicate with the customer throughout the relationship.

All members of a team must work together to achieve this performance goal while also maintaining best practices. In our experience, the best team members welcome the chance to join a high performing team.

That We Look for Ways to Grow as a Company

All companies need to grow, but this doesn’t always mean growth in market share or property valuation. It also means growth through collaborating with each other to help grow the larger InfraStripe family.

Growing can require looking at our jobs from different points of view. We need team members who are open to new innovations and to conversations about improving our methods. We’ve also found the best people welcome this kind of growth and change.

Being Who We Are is How We’ll Grow

If you’ve been around InfraStripe for a while you’ve already noticed the credentials we explored above line up seamlessly with our core values. This is no coincidence.

As we work to attract and retain career-minded professionals, our appeal as a company comes from what we value as a company. By living our core values everyday, we will attract the people who can help us exemplify these values.

The post It’s Careers in Construction Month. How Do We Attract New Team Members? appeared first on InfraStripe.

But this reasoning isn’t good enough for the families and friends of the 104 students who were killed, and it’s not good enough for the nation’s infrastructure profession. Complacency will not help us build a culture that expects zero school-bus involved collisions and zero fatalities every school year. That’s the type of culture InfraStripe is working every day to build and strengthen.

So how can we make our zero-incident expectation a reality? How do we get from 104 fatalities to 0? We decided to study this question as the nation’s students get into the rhythm of the new school year this month.

First we looked into whether other forms of transportation, besides school buses, could be safer for students. The facts don’t support this theory. School bus travel is remarkably safe. On average, buses are some of the safest vehicles on the road.

One reason is physics. School buses encase students in a simple and strong steel structure, and buses are normally the heaviest vehicles involved in a collision. This increases the odds of school bus passengers surviving a collision.

Plus, school buses have gotten safer over the past decade. Modern buses feature more points of exit and shatter-proof glass along with extra lights that make them more visible than ever.

We had to dig deeper into the numbers to find a place to start improving travel conditions for students. Those numbers led us to ourselves, the drivers of commercial vehicles and private passenger cars and trucks, who share the road with school buses every morning and afternoon.

The data shows that many of the fatalities involving school buses each year happen around buses as children board and unboard — once the students are no longer protected by the bus’s design.

This knowledge gives us a place to start. This school year, when we’re driving on the same stretch of road as a school bus, let’s always:

• Keep some distance: There’s no need to tailgate a school bus. Even when it has stopped to pick up or drop off a student, stay back. Give the bus and its passengers plenty of room.
• Expect the unexpected: Children can do unexpected things, like running back toward the bus to retrieve something they’ve forgotten. When we’re on autopilot — or if we’ve been busy sending a text or checking a voicemail — we’re less likely to anticipate this kind of erratic behavior.
• Know the law: Unless we’re traveling in the opposite direction, in lanes separated from the bus by a grass median, we’re required to stop when a bus shows its flashing lights and stop sign.

These steps will save lives this school year. We don’t control what happens inside every vehicle on the road, but we do control our own behavior. When more of us keep safety in focus as we drive, we will have a stronger, and life-saving, safety culture.

The post Our Back to School Assignment: How to Make 104 Equal 0 appeared first on InfraStripe.

Self-driving cars may be our future, but for now, human drivers do some important things better.

Like seeing what’s not clearly visible. An experienced human driver can extrapolate the location of lane markers, medians, and stop bars — even when the markers are faded, covered by snow, or obscured by fog or sun glare. Most of us do this without knowing we’re doing it.

Computer-drivers aren’t good at extrapolating. They look for absolutes. If you’ve tried an autonomous car, you may have felt the engine hesitating as the computer-driver interpreted unclear road markings. You can almost feel the car thinking for a few seconds before it figures out what to do and does it.

Researchers are trying to help. Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have teamed up with Western Michigan University to develop a new kind of micro transmitter — one that can be embedded inside pavement markers.

From inside the pavement markers, these transmitters communicate with self-driving cars as they travel along the roadway above. With data from these transmitters worked into their navigational equations, computer-drivers can ”see“ pavement markers even when they’re not visible on the car’s cameras — much like a skilled human driver can.

The engineers who developed this technology tested it and reported their findings in a technical paper. According to their data, embedded chips in pavement markers reduced the processing power computer-drivers assigned for navigation. In some driving conditions, the micro transmitters reduced processing power by 90 percent.

In human terms, this means the computer-drivers didn’t have to turn down the radio and tell everyone else in the car to be quiet so they could better focus on the road.

We’re intrigued by this new technology. It exists at the intersection of safety, quality work, and innovation — qualities we focus on every day. Our InfraStripe family of companies already excels at creating clear and easy-to-understand pavement markers. Our work already makes roads safer for human drivers and computer drivers alike.

Innovations like embedding microchips in pavement markers adds another layer of safety as more autonomous cars merge onto our nation’s roadways. We’ll be paying close attention to these kinds of innovations as we embrace the safety needs of tomorrow.

The post Innovators Are Helping Self-Driving Cars by Improving Their ‘Vision’ appeared first on InfraStripe.

Did you know that smoking cigarettes used to be considered safe? In fact, smoking was deemed good for your health. So said “doctors in all parts of the country” in this 1949 ad for Camel cigarettes. Yet, just 22 years later, in 1971, the federal government banned tobacco companies from placing TV and radio ads because smoking was causing cancer.

So, what changed about cigarettes between 1949 and 1971 to inspire this change from “doctor recommended” to “too dangerous to advertise on TV?”

Nothing changed about cigarettes. The change took place in our culture.

Our culture helps us define what’s safe and unsafe. Because of this, what our culture considers “safe behavior” changes as our culture changes. That’s how the same activity that was “safe” in 1949 turned “deadly” by 1971. In the case of cigarettes, research and observational data about smoking helped drive this cultural shift.

Similar safety shifts have played out, over and over, throughout modern history. In the early days of industrialization, for example, adults worked in factories for 16 or more hours per day, seven days a week, alongside their small children who worked long hours, too. Factory owners fired workers who got hurt and couldn’t work. This was a normal way to run a factory. It’s not normal anymore, at least not in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Same goes for personal decisions like buckling up in the car. If you’re 40 or older, you probably didn’t wear a seat belt growing up. Now, you probably buckle up. What changed? Our safety culture.

Large infrastructure projects were especially unsafe for workers of previous centuries. For example, the Brooklyn Bridge, constructed in the 1870s and early 1880s, claimed at least 21 lives. Eleven people died building the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s. Building the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, killed at least 25,000 people.

We know each of these lost lives held immeasurable value, and we assume each death was grieved by the deceased person’s family and friends. But how did our culture respond to these infrastructure-related deaths? With a shrug, more or less. In those days it was normal to die at work when you worked a dangerous job.

Of course, you could argue that without the internet, the general public didn’t hear about these deaths, so the public had no way to decide whether the death toll was culturally acceptable. That’s true. But the fact that the deaths weren’t front-page news also shows how 19th and 20th century culture accepted construction worker deaths as a typical part of life.

Modern construction work is much safer than it was a century ago, partly because our culture no longer considers death a customary part of the job. Even so, tragic and unexpected accidents still happen on American job sites. Some crew members don’t make it home alive at the end of their shift, and others suffer life-changing injuries on the job. Still others develop chronic injuries that quietly affect the rest of their lives.

History tells us culture should continue to shift toward safety, making our work safer along the way. At InfraStripe we can’t wait for the culture to change. It’s our job, as leaders in the industry, to change the culture, to help shift culture more toward safety, to help build a culture of safety through which everybody does more to avoid injuries and fatalities — a culture that builds safety into every decision about every project.

We do this through our daily habits, through innovation, and through our interactions with anyone who works in transportation or uses transportation.

The post How Do You Improve Safety? By Shifting Safety Culture appeared first on InfraStripe.