U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater Announces Nearly $1 Million for Tennessee to Help Reduce Alcohol-Related |
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Topics: Rodney E. Slater
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NHTSA
October 1, 1999
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NHTSA 50-99
Friday, October 1, 1999
Contact: NHTSA, Tim Hurd, (202) 366-9550
U. S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater today announced a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Department of Transportation and Tennessee that gives Tennessee $997,898 to reduce alcohol related crashes. "A strong message and tough state laws have done a lot to bring about a change in the public's attitude toward impaired driving," said Secretary Slater. "Safety is President Clinton's highest transportation priority and these funds will work toward lowering those numbers."
The funds will assist the state in increasing levels of law enforcement with heightened publicity through a 30-month demonstration and evaluation program.
To receive the funding, the state submitted a proposal that met specific requirements for administering the demonstration program. The program will involve a study to compare the effects of different types of law enforcement procedures -- checkpoints, saturation and roving patrols--when used in separate parts of the state. The overall number of enforcement activities also will increase dramatically during the 15-month intervention period.
This builds on a previous effort which used sobriety checkpoints as a means of reducing alcohol-related crashes and resulted in a 20 percent reduction over the number of drunk driving fatal crashes that would have occurred with no intervention. Funding will also support a program evaluation that will provide critical information needed by the law enforcement community on the extent to which the procedures can reduce alcohol-related crashes.
"In 1998, a person was killed every 30 minutes in an alcohol-related crash. In Tennessee alone, 499 people died last year," said Ricardo Martinez, M.D., administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "Programs like this one in Tennessee will redouble our efforts to reduce the number of these crashes and the tragedies that accompany them."
This 30-month effort in Tennessee hopes to demonstrate that a comprehensive and sustained law enforcement effort combined with publicity directed at getting safety messages about this program to the public can result in a substantial drop in alcohol-related crashes.
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