By 1965 there were a total of 90,357,667 vehicles (private and public) registered in the United States and there were 98,502 licensed drivers driving those vehicles. With 51 jurisdictions keeping track of all those drivers using their own methods and terminology, it became clear that road safety was being impacted by folks not being able to understand out of state data, such as a suspension on a driver’s record, a reason on a crash report, etc. The situation was serious enough for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to put a requirement into the federal regulations with the threat of the loss of highway funds—enter the Data Element Dictionary for Traffic Records Systems (D20). D20 provides standard terminology and coding instructions used by motor vehicle administrators (MVAs) to describe vehicle registration, drivers, and crashes. In other words, it established a common language for MVAs to use when sharing data. Without these standards, each of the 51 U.S. jurisdictions would record elements with their own data definitions, which would then have to be mapped to 50 other formats allowing the states to exchange the information. D20 currently has 520 elements that are referenced 13,250 times in AAMVA messages. If each state had its own format, that could be 662,500 elements to map. While traffic injuries continue to happen, not understanding the data is no longer cited as a contributing cause. For 50 years AAMVA has been tasked with maintaining the D20 Standards, and for 50 years the challenges of the 1960s have not been a concern. That's fewer headaches for our member jurisdictions, which is something to celebrate.