IT’S rare, but when credit is due, police are more than happy to give praise to drivers for heeding the road safety message over the four-day Melbourne Cup period.
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It was a relatively incident-free weekend on Ballarat’s roads as police patrolled major freeways and back roads.
In all, officers conducted 834 breath tests and caught just the one motorist drink driving.
Inspector Trevor Cornwill said police wrote up 170 tickets which included a mix of offences such as using a mobile phone, no seatbelts and speeding.
“Only 10 drivers were deemed to driving under the influence which includes both drink and drug driving,” he said.
“We had no major accidents, no injuries and no fatalities which is incredibly pleasing.
”We don’t say it often by drivers need to be congratulated especially given the in]clement weather. It seems that people are heeding the message and speed limits.”
Inspector Cornwill said there was over 350 hours of police patrol time in Ballarat over the four days of Operation Furlong.
He said despite the good result, there was no time for complacency.
“We’ve got a long weekend locally and there’s number of shows and events happening leading into the summer months,” he said.
“There’s a lot who are going away on holidays, so we are going to continue on with the same messaging, plan your trip, use the freeways when possible, don’t drive for more than two hours at a time because fatigue is one of the biggest killers on the road.”
Across the state there were 115,000 tests which detected 8949 offences. Sadly there were five fatalities, down from nine from the same period last year.
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