Officials at the Department of Public Safety are so fed up with increased speeding on state roads — and its resulting high death toll — that they are planning to carry out an education and enforcement campaign that will last the entire summer.
Crackdowns typically last anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks and occasionally for a month. But with traffic fatalities already alarmingly high and the busiest travel season yet to come, law enforcement will work overtime every day from Memorial Day to Labor Day to pull over lead-footed drivers, said Mike Hanson, director of the department’s office of traffic safety.
“We are doing something unprecedented to bring sanity to our roads,” Hanson said. “When a small percentage of drivers think the rules [of the road] don’t apply, that is when there is chaos and tragedy.”
And there has been plenty of that. As February drew to a close, 50 people had lost their lives in crashes this year in Minnesota. That’s 18 more deaths than during the first two months of last year and the most in that time period over the past five years, state data shows.
“These are numbers we don’t see at this time of year when you have a normal January and February,” Hanson said.
The absence of a traditional Minnesota winter has contributed to the grim and troublesome statistics, Hanson said. Crash numbers typically go up during January and February due to icy and snowy roads. However, a majority of them are of the fender-bender variety because speeds generally are slower, Hanson said.
This year, dry roads have led to fewer wrecks, Hanson said. But without conditions forcing drivers to slow down, speeds are way up, and crashes, when they happen, have turned deadly.
“Speeding makes everything worse,” Hanson said. “A crash brings energy, and energy determines the outcome.”
