Speeding, Seatbelts Bigger Issues Than Booze Over Memorial Day: NYSP

HUDSON VALLEY, NY — Over Memorial Day weekend, 1,757 of the 13,688 tickets that New York State police issued in their annual traffic enforcement campaign were written in the Hudson Valley (not counting the Thruway).

But while it was billed as a Stop DWI campaign, it was a lot more.

Which is not to say that drunken driving wasn't a factor over the long holiday weekend. Troopers charged 213 people with driving while intoxicated statewide. In the Hudson Valley, state police issued 82 tickets for DWI.

Many more people were engaged in different dangerous behavior, however. Troopers in the Hudson Valley wrote 884 tickets for speeding and issued 601 tickets for drivers or passengers without a proper seatbelt or child safety seat. More people got tickets for distracted driving (102) in the region than for driving drunk.

And what is so hard about the "move over" law? Nearly a third of tickets issued across the state to drivers who didn't move over were in the Hudson Valley.

Here's the complete breakdown by region and type of violation:

Over the four-day campaign, troopers investigated 808 crashes statewide, including 142 personal injury crashes and eight fatal crashes, which killed eight people.

For comparison, during last year’s Memorial Day Weekend enforcement campaign, which ran from Friday, May 28 through Tuesday, June 1, New York State police issued 14,249 total tickets and arrested 185 people for DWI.