ATLANTA — The death toll on Georgia’s highways continues to climb this July 4th holiday weekend.
As of Monday evening, the Georgia State Patrol reported that, since Friday evening, 14 people have been killed in wrecks on interstates and state highways.
Last year, there were 11 traffic fatalities during the shorter, Fourth of July holiday weekend
Curtis Mullins, of McDonough, said he hates driving on the interstates any time of year, he described it as dangerous.
“Until they start slowing more people down, I mean, it's scary-- even to be near the left lane,” Mullins said. “You want to be in the far right just to feel safe. Sometimes that's not even so safe, because it's a lot of trucks on that side that want to go faster than they need to be going.”
Georgia State Patrol troopers are stepping up enforcement for four days.
They are likely to issue more than the 9,000 tickets that they wrote during the shorter July 4th weekend, a year ago, and investigate hundreds of crashes, as they did a year ago.
Sosa, of Atlanta, just drove back home from Florida and said he saw one GSP trooper after another issuing tickets along I-75.
“If you go the speed limit,“ Sosa said, “you're going to get run over” (by other cars and trucks going much faster). “So, you got to go like, 75, 80, or faster, that's like regular Atlanta traffic,” which, he worried, put him at risk of getting a ticket.
Trad Sherrick was driving from Florida to Muskegon, Michigan.
“We've been cruisin’ at 65” miles an hour," he said. “Even truck drivers are just going right on by.”
He said he’s seeing no evidence that the extra enforcement is slowing the speeders.
“We've seen probably four or five ‘speed traps’ on the way, where they're lined up and were just pulling people over and doing their job,” he said. “But nothing is slowing anybody down.”
From the trooper’s point of view, the speeding and the fatalities would be even worse without their extra holiday enforcement, which will continue through Tuesday night; then the state will release the final report on the impact of this year’s crackdown.