Cell Phone Use Most Frequent Pedestrian Safety Month Violation

officers have issued more than 140 tickets during the department's that concludes Wednesday, Lt. Derek Bastinck said.

Since Aug. 9, officers have cracked down on motor vehicle violations by employing marked units, unmarked units and sting operations at busy intersection around town. In some cases, police used spotters to stand on street corners and radio over seatbelt and cell phone violations to police cars waiting further down the road.

Nearly a third of the 142 total tickets written as of Sept. 2 -- and more than twice the number of any other offense -- were for cell phone use, said Bastinck, who spearheaded the initiative that was intended to increase pedestrian safety awareness heading into the school year.

Police focused their crosswalk enforcement on busy intersections along Fair Lawn Avenue, Maple Avenue and River Road, and Bastinck said that about half of the 19 tickets written for a driver's failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk were the result of successful stings.

Six of the traffic stops police made resulted in arrests of individuals who had oustanding warrants, including one for $2,000 that the borough recouped, Bastinck said.

Here's a complete breakdown of the tickets written during the crackdown:

142 total tickets

-104 for moving violations (43 for cell phones; 20 for failure to observe a traffic signal;19 for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk; 12 for seatbelt; 10 were for careless driving

-32 for vehicle safety and equipment (i.e. headlights or tail lights out, no front license plate, broken mirrors, etc.)

-6 for suspended driver's license

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