Wyckoff Wins Award of Excellence for Community Traffic Safety

The Township of Wyckoff was awarded the American Automobile Association’s highest award, the Award of Excellence, from the North Jersey American Automobile Association for its efforts to promote traffic safety.

Wyckoff was one of only ten municipalities in all of Bergen, Passaic and Hudson Counties to receive this honor. It is the ninth time in eleven years this award has been achieved.

The Award of Excellence from AAA was presented to Wyckoff for its continued and consistent efforts of the Wyckoff Police Department in improving pedestrian safety throughout the community.

Efforts to enhance community traffic safety include:

• Safe driving information distributed through resident newsletters, public service announcements and e-mail blasts.
• Enforcement of speed limits.
• Enforcement of the law that requires motorists to STOP and allow pedestrians in a crosswalk to safety cross the street.

Some safety programs include:

Safety talks with children and senior citizens, demonstrations by bicycle patrol officers at schools, child safety seat inspections by certified police officers, periodic reviews of crash data to review cause and make possible changes, assist school officials in working to develop and maintain safe traffic patterns in school areas, a letter from the Police Chief to school parents reminding them that they should yield to pedestrians, providing school crossing guards with hand held LED flashing STOP signs, obey the speed limit and not be a distracted driver, reviewed school crosswalk locations and made engineering changes at some to improve visibility and overall safety, installed traffic delineators at numerous school and high pedestrian crosswalk locations to improve motorist awareness to yield to pedestrians, worked with AAA personnel to present the “Otto the Auto” safety program to children, police officers visit children at the annual “Safety Town”, organized special DWI patrols, displayed traffic trailer at various locations to advise motorists of their speed and to display safety messages, trained school crossing guards in traffic safety and distributed traffic safety literature to the community.

Wyckoff believes in the three “E’s” philosophy in traffic safety – “Education, Enforcement and Engineering.” The Police Department continues to look for new ways to improve safety within the Township utilizing all three principles.