Highway Safety Enforcement Push Planned For Holidays

Several state Departments of Transportation are planning a multi-pronged highway safety enforcement blitz to coincide with the heavy roadway travel expected for the holiday season.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) in conjunction with local police departments across the Keystone state are joining forces to conduct "Operation Safe Holiday": an initiative including seat-belt, aggressive-driving, and impaired-driving enforcement.

PennDOT data indicates that the holidays continue to be the leading time period for traffic crashes. For example, there were 4,235 crashes and 49 fatalities last year during the Thanksgiving travel period, which includes the weekends before and after the holiday. During the Christmas and New Year travel periods, there were a combined 1,994 crashes and nineteen fatalities.

AAA projected 43.6 million Americans will have journeyed fifty miles or more from home during the Thanksgiving holiday "weekend" – running from Wednesday, November 21 to Sunday, November 25 – which would count as an increase of 0.7 percent over the 43.3 million people that traveled during Thanksgiving in 2011.

This increase would mark the fourth consecutive year of growing holiday travelers since 2008 when Thanksgiving travel fell by 25 percent, and the group noted that roughly 90 percent of all Thanksgiving holiday travelers – equating to 39.1 million people – will travel by automobile, an increase of 0.6 percent over 2011.

North Carolina is another state that plans a highway safety push over the holidays, as it noted 397 unbuckled motorists died in crashes on its roads last year.

In an effort to reduce such fatalities, the N.C. Department of Transportation is launching a statewide Thanksgiving "Click It or Ticket" campaign to crack down on motorists who are not wearing their seat belts.

In 2011 the Research Triangle Institute reported that North Carolina’s seat belt usage rate topped 88.7 percent percent; a big increase from the usage rate of 65 percent when the program started in 1993.

North Carolina’s seat belt usage rate exceeds the 86 percent usage rate for the U.S. as a whole, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) new 2012 National Occupant Protection Use Survey released late-November.

"When it comes to driving safely, one of the most effective ways to protect yourself and your family is to use a seat belt," said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. "We're urging everyone on our roadways to buckle up – every trip, every time."

NHTSA added that seat belt use has steadily increased since 1994, with the record high of 86 percent recorded this year representing a two percent increase over 2011. Among the most dramatic increases in seat belt use were in the southern region of the country, rising to 85 percent in 2012 — up from eighty percent in 2011.

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