2022 Southeast Regional Award Winner

Steve Hoernig

Steve Hoernig has been a lifetime Traffic and Highway Safety advocate. He retired from MoDOT on September 1, 2022, with 29 years of dedicated service. In his career, he has worked solely in the action of promoting Highway Safety in all forms of engineering and education. He has educated many by attending and presenting to local schools, conferences, cities, counties, local elected officials, and the everyday public. He dedicated his career to saving lives by implementing many engineering safety measures on the roadway.

Throughout his career, he has seen and overseen many of the safety measures we point to today as saving thousands of lives on our roadways. Some of these measures include the recent system-wide approach of increased visibility of signing and striping, implementation of the chevron initiative, centerline and edgeline rumble stripes, reflective backplates for increased visibility of the signals, flashing yellow arrow, guard cable, and many striping upgrades over the years with both visibility and width. Hoernig has also been involved with the implementation of many of our innovative engineering solutions like the roundabout, diverging diamond, J-Turns, and many more.

Lastly, Hoernig has also been involved with increased safety when it relates to our workers and the traveling public, so everyone goes home safe when we must perform work on the roadways. He served as the district work zone coordinator, where he led the effort of inspecting work zones for proper utilization of safety.

His everyday work environment also included taking calls from anyone in the public at any level and helping them to find an answer or solution to their concern. He earned the nickname by his co-workers as “Traffic Steve”. Thank you, Steve, for your dedication and service to making Missouri’s roads a safer place.