- New York just had an eight-day crackdown on dangerous driving, handing out a ton of tickets.
- The crackdown focused on impaired driving but issued more tickets for distracted driving.
- The majority of violations were for “other” offenses, with speeding as the second-most common.
St. Patrick’s Day may be over, but New York’s traffic enforcement is still going strong—except this time, it’s in the form of a full-on crackdown. The state rolled out a special enforcement period from March 10 to 17, during which it handed out tickets at a rate so high, you’d think they were trying to break some kind of record.
In fact, they issued nearly 56,000 tickets, which comes to about 290 tickets every single hour for eight straight days. Surprisingly, only two percent of those tickets were for driving under the influence.
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During the eight-day period, law enforcement used sobriety checkpoints and increased police patrols to keep the roads safe. It’s similar to other impaired driving campaigns the state runs during Independence Day, Halloween, and other holidays. But St. Patrick’s Day had a bit of a twist. See, drinking is practically a cultural institution for the holiday, so you can imagine the level of scrutiny it invites.
“Public safety is my number one priority, and alongside our partners in law enforcement, we’re cracking down on dangerous and illegal driving that puts our communities at risk,” Governor Hochul said. “I’ll always stand up to protect the people of New York, and I encourage everyone to drive responsibly over holidays, celebrations and beyond.”
Now, the numbers from this little enforcement blitz are… well, interesting. Of the 55,661 tickets handed out, nearly 40,000 were for “other violations,” whatever that means. We’ll assume it covers everything from blowing through stop signs to cutting people off on the highway. The second-most common infraction? Speeding, with 10,314 citations. To put that in perspective, that’s 53 speeding tickets issued every hour for eight straight days.
Interestingly, though, while the program was supposed to be about impaired driving, the state only handed out 1,224 tickets for that particular offense. That’s a little over six tickets per hour during the eight-day period of enforcement. The state issued almost twice as many for distracted driving.
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In fact, they could’ve called this the St. Patty’s Day Seat Belt Awareness Campaign since they handed out more seatbelt tickets (1,428) than impaired driving ones. Hey, at least they cited 364 people for not moving over in the process. If anything, this just proves that drivers don’t have to be impaired to be out there making countless other mistakes.