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Published on Wednesday, December 29, 2004
in the Palm Beach Post
When the Operation Safe Ride pilot program started, it targeted two counties: Palm Beach and Broward.
The campaign was so successful that officials in Tallahassee commissioned the Florida Highway Patrol to implement it statewide.
On Tuesday, FHP released the numbers for its latest campaign.
About 4,000 people took home a little, unexpected, last-minute gift for the holidays: a traffic citation.
"With the holiday falling on a weekend this year, we knew there would be a lot of people on the road," said Lt. Tim Frith, FHP spokesman. "We wanted to focus on that holiday travel."
The plan was to schedule four, 48-hour enforcement operations on major highways. The hurricanes put a damper on the third but the fourth went ahead as scheduled Thursday and Friday. The citations, issued during patrols that logged more than 101,000 miles, were broken into 12 categories. Among them were:
* 2,609 for speeding.
* 201 for aggressive driving.
* 44 for driving under the influence.
"Traffic fatalities are down this year," Frith said. "I think it has a lot to do with our program."
The first phase was Feb. 26-27 and the second, which targeted commercial vehicles such as tractor-trailer trucks, was May 13-14.
Frith attributes much of the success to using all resources to crack down on aggressive drivers, including the agency's new Mercury Marauders.
"They are unique in the fact that they are not the typical unmarked Crown Victoria which drivers think could be a police car," he said, adding that the troopers now have 18 statewide. "And we all know people drive differently when they see a police car."
Dates for the program's second year are expected to be released in January.
"We've gotten a huge response from the public through calls and e-mails," Frith said. "They all say how great it is and that it was long overdue."