Auto Glass Safety Council Meets with State, National Safety Groups
The Auto Glass Safety Council participated in the September 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 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 dubbed “Traffic Safety in a Changing World” and featured presentations and seminars from officials of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and state highway offices. Amidst 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, it is important for AGSC to participate in such conferences to educate other safety advocates about the Automotive Glass Replacement Safety Standard (AGRSS standard) and learn best practices.
Representing AGSC at the conference were President Mike Schenian from City Auto Glass, St. Paul, MN and Public Affairs Director Seth Maiman. “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 AGSC president 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”.
AGSC also had the opportunity to discuss recent and upcoming legislation regarding auto glass safety with state officials and representatives of national organizations. AGSC continues to promote state adoption of auto glass replacement safety standards similar to the new Maryland law.
AGSC is also working in several states on legislation that addresses calibration and ADAS. AGSC officials participated in a education seminar panel discussion about these legislative issues at Auto Glass Week in San Antonio. The session highlighted legislation that has been enacted in Arizona, Maryland Utah in recent years and bills that were considered in Illinois, Massachusetts and Virginia. AGSC expects to see increased interest in auto glass safety issues amongst policymakers with the increased need for calibration in newer model ADAS equipped vehicles.
AGSC works with GHSA year-round and recently sponsored a GHSA webinar on occupant protection which can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/729799020.
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