Gilroy – The holiday weekend was blessedly quiet in terms of
alcohol-related accidents and arrests. Now, if people would only
learn to wear their seatbelts.
Gilroy – The holiday weekend was blessedly quiet in terms of alcohol-related accidents and arrests. Now, if people would only learn to wear their seatbelts.
Gilroy police made four driving under the influence arrests from Dec. 24 to Dec. 26. That’s one more than last year, but across the county and state, DUI arrests and accidents were down sharply from previous holiday weekends.
A Gilroy man was arrested in Morgan Hill Sunday evening after a collision sent one person to the hospital and closed down a portion of Monterey Road northbound for a short time.
Don Olson, 49, was taken to county jail on suspicion of driving under the influence after a two-vehicle accident at San Pedro Avenue and Monterey Road at about 6:30pm. One victim was briefly trapped in a vehicle after the collision.
Other details about the accident were unavailable.
The California Highway patrol responded to eight collisions and made one DUI arrest on Santa Clara County roads from the 24th to the 27th. Over the same period last year, there were four arrests and 22 collisions.
“We attribute the decline to being out there in force,” said CHP officer Matt Ramirez. “We have more officers on the road trying to make people aware that we’re looking out for impaired drivers, and that if you’re drinking, you’re going to jail.”
There were no traffic fatalities in the county, but there were 26 deaths on California’s. Remarkably, of the 17 vehicle-occupants killed in the Highway Patrol’s jurisdiction, 13 were not strapped in.
“The message is fairly clear here,” said Highway Patrol Spokesman Tom Marshall. “It only takes a second to buckle up. If those people had, I know most of them would be here to see the new year.”
But overall, fatalities were down this year. In 1999, the last time Christmas fell on a Saturday, 34 people were killed on the state’s roads. Last year, with Christmas on Thursday, 61 were killed over the four-day holiday weekend.
Law enforcement officials said Monday that a new public relations campaign gets some of the credit. Called “Operation Holiday Wish List,” the program calls for increased police presence and reminders to drive safely: Buckle up, obey the speed limit and designate a driver.
“We never know what our successes are, we never know who we reach,” Marshall said. “We can only go by the statistics and see what we did differently. The program got a lot of publicity.”
Marshall said the campaign will not expire with the end of the holiday season, but continue for at least a year or two to combat DUI figures that have been moving in the wrong direction for the last five years.
“Trends have been moving up on DUI and (lack of) seatbelt use and we want to turn it around before it becomes a real slide,” Marshall said. “We’ll do it until we turn these numbers around. California has the best roads in the world, and because we all drive so much, California should have the best drivers.”
Another program, called Avoid the 13, an annual campaign against driving under the influence, continues through Sunday and combines the efforts of law enforcement agencies, including Gilroy and Morgan Hill police, the CHP and the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department.
