A new distracted driving corridor has popped up in Mercer County.
The temporarily distracted driving corridor is a six-mile stretch of US-33 that starts at SR-197 and ends at US-127. The zone was established to reduce serious crashes caused by numerous violations like speeding and driving distracted.
Mercer County has had a total of 88 crashes because of distracted drivers since the beginning of 2019. The highway patrol says this is not an effort to just hand out more tickets to unsafe drivers, but it’s a way to educate the public on how to become safer drivers.
John Westerfield, the lieutenant post commander at Wapakoneta post of the Highway Patrol says, “We kind of get the bad rap of always giving out just a citation, and that’s not always the case. We do a lot of things on the road and off the road to try to educate the public. When we make a traffic stop, it’s not always automatically a citation. Sometimes it’s just, ‘hey we stopped you for this, we noticed this, here’s a warning.’ we talk to them about what they did wrong.”
The corridor has been in place since August 1st and will conclude on September 30th.
