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Effectiveness of Efforts In 2011, our agency continued to use education, information and enforcement to promote traffic safety on our roadways. We make ongoing efforts to impact all areas of traffic safety to include occupant protection, speed enforcement and impaired driving. All of our efforts have been extremely effective in reducing the severity of injury crashes, DUI crashes and DUI injury crashes. We pride ourselves in our traffic safety and enforcement programs as some of the best in the region. It is a proven fact that enforcement alone is not enough. That is why we have partnered with our community and schools to help promote more education and public information to work hand in hand with our enforcement efforts. The Traffic Safety Supervisor monitors the crashes and traffic violations throughout the city to identify areas of concern. This allows us to then do more directed enforcement or education as needed in a particular area. While we had one fatal crash in 2011 it was not related to speed or impaired driving. Also for 2011 there were no major injury crashes at all associated to impaired driving. Overall injury crashes were down from the previous year. Seatbelt surveys are conducted quarterly by the Traffic Safety Supervisor. Three sites around the city are surveyed in addition to the High School. Also a Child Safety Survey is done during this time. Our High School students were the worst offenders, starting the year with only a 49 percent usage rate. By the end of the year we had them up to 61 percent. In general our citizens went from 63 percent usage to 72 percent. We are continually working to address this area and increase the usage rate. 2011 was again another year that we observed a drop in citations across the board with the exception of 4 more child seat citations. There was also a significant drop in DUI arrests. We would like to attribute this to our aggressive enforcement practices and education/public information efforts and we expect them to continue to decrease. Below are graphs showing our efforts and their effectiveness. These will show that in 2011 we were effective in our efforts.
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