Final Wave ‘Smooth Operator’ May Have Helped Quiet Holiday Traffic

During Labor Day weekend many people took the time to spend with family and friends. According to AAA, 730,000 vehicles were forecasted as traveling through the Greater Washington Area over this holiday weekend. In order to make sure that drivers were safe, Montgomery County Police participated in The Smooth Operator Campaign. "We have hundreds of officers who worked on this over the weekend," said Police Department Media Services Division spokesman Capt. Paul Starks.

The Smooth Operator Campaign has been a summer-long initiative involving multiple metropolitan police departments. This Labor Day Weekend saw the start of the final wave of the program which runs through Sept. 18. During this period, police are targeting aggressive driving such as speeding, tailgating, unsafe lane changing, failing to yield the right-of-way, and running red lights and stop signs.

This weekend there weren't any major traffic incidents in Montgomery County. Starks could not say if the Smooth Operator Campaign—in which law enforcement departments in Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia target "aggressive driving behaviors"—played a part in the lack of incidents. "Being it's a holiday, the stats on traffic stops and tickets issued haven't been tabulated yet," said Starks, who added it will likely take a few days for those figures to be calculated. However, the county is eager "to get the word out on results" once all the data is collected, he said.

AAA forecasted that about 800,000 motorists would travel through the Greater Washington Area over the Labor Day weekend, but the prediction fell short by about 70,000 drivers, said John Townsend, spokesman for the DC Metro Area AAA.

In addition to the 730,000 drivers, from 25,000 to 30,000 traveled through the Greater Washington Area—which includes Maryland as far north as Baltimore, Northern Virginia and the West Virginia panhandle—by air, and about another 23,000 traveled into or out of the area by other means of transportation, Townsend said.

Even though hundreds and thousands of drivers passed in and around the Greater Washington area, there were fewer vehicle accidents than in years past, for several reasons, Townsend said. Among those reasons include the Smooth Operator Campaign. "Aggressive driving is one of the biggest problems in this area, and the Smooth Operator Campaign has had a tremendous impact," he said.

 "Ten years ago, the thing drivers most feared were drunk drivers. Today, the two things motorists fear the most are aggressive drivers and distracted drivers," Townsend said. It is the sheer number of drivers on the road in the Greater Washington Area that is frustrating some drivers and turns them from "Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde," he said.