South Whitehall Township police recently conducted several patrols as part of a special aggressive driving funding project.

"This enforcement is part of the Pennsylvania Aggressive Driving En-forcement and Education project and is funded by part of PennDOT's $2.5 million investment of federal funds from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration," South Whitehall Police Sgt. Mark C. Ruff said. "South Whitehall Township Police Patrol Division applies for and has received grants to conduct Aggressive Driving enforcement on a yearly basis.

"However, this past year, due to a high incident rate of motor vehicle accidents in the area, we applied for a special funding offering in January 2014."

Ruff said the application process consisted of approximately seven pages of documentary information and area crash statistics.

"We received $1,500 for wave one enforcement, which consisted of three operations in which officers made 74 contacts and wrote 66 citations," Ruff said. "We received $2,000 for wave two enforcement, which consisted of three operations in which officers made 80 contacts and wrote 59 citations."

The department was also awarded special funding of $3,150 for four operations during which officers made 122 contacts and wrote 88 citations.

"Officers cited individuals for speeding, red light and stop sign violations, tailgating, as well as inspection violations and suspended operators," Ruff said. "Officers were also observing and citing for seat belt non-compliance."

The area targeted for the aggressive driving project was the Tilghman Street corridor and roadways directing traffic onto it.

"PennDOT crash stats also indicate this area as having a high rate of crashes and PennDOT as well as the North Central Highway Safety Network indicated this as our targeted enforcement zone when using their funding," Ruff said. "We have had 512 motor vehicle crashes throughout the South Whitehall Township portion of Tilghman Street in the past six years. The highest rate of occurrence is between 3-6:30 p.m."

Mark Alonge, project coordinator for the Pennsylvania Aggressive and Driving Enforcement and Education program, also spoke with The Press.

"The Pennsylvania Aggressive Driving Enforcement and Education Project is a PennDOT funded enforcement and education project administered by the North Central Highway Safety Network and we work specifically with municipal police agencies," Alonge said. "We usually have three enforcement waves a year and they range between four to six weeks.

"We provide extra dollars for police agencies to patrol for aggressive drivers."

Alonge said $2,000 for two waves comes from the regular fund and the $3,000 comes from special funding.

"The difference is police agencies have opportunities to do enforcement outside the scheduled waves," he said. "We had waves in March and July and the special enforcement was in February and March."

"We identified 400 aggressive roadways in the state of Pennsylvania," Alonge said. "We used different criteria to determine the level of aggressive driving roadways."

"The four levels include crash data in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration aggressive driving definition, local aggressive driving data from PennDOT, speeding and high cluster aggressive driving data," he said. "Tilghman Street came up under one of the four levels is why it got chosen."