The Missouri State Highway Patrol is gearing up for one of the busiest travel weekends of the year—and with it, a rise in impaired driving.
Lt. Eric Brown told Missourinet that to keep roads safe, extra troopers will be out during the Thanksgiving holiday.
“The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is actually one of the busiest bar nights of the year,” said Brown. “You know, we have a lot of extra vehicles on the road. People were going to be using substances that impair their ability, driving to be on those roadways. So, we focused a lot of our efforts in those nighttime hours. When that occurs the most.”
Brown explained why impaired driving incidents increase this time of year.
“You have a lot of family gatherings,” said Brown. “You have a lot of parties, work related gatherings, and oftentimes the alcohol or other impairing substances are involved in those. It can be very dangerous, obviously, to drive impaired. We know that impaired drivers often cause crashes, often cause fatal crashes.”
Brown told Missourinet that obviously the largest number of crashes will happen on the main higher-volume highways.
“Your interstates traveling you know north and south, east and west across the state, but we do have, you know, serious crashes that occur on our secondary roadways and our drive roads as well,” said Brown. “Generally, it’s just due to bad decision making by drivers driving excessive speeds drive while they’re impaired, all these different varying things can cause traffic crashes.”
Brown said it really comes down to the driver of the vehicle making a bad decision that results in a crash occurring.
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