BANGOR (AP) – Maine State Police have begun using lasers at dangerous intersections and along stretches of road where motorists commonly speed in an effort to crack down on habitual violators.

Maine State Police Sgt. Christopher Coleman said officers also will use aircraft to check speeds as the state seeks to curb moving violations, particularly those that involve dangerous speeds.

It isn’t that the number of overall tickets state troopers have issued has increased much in recent years, but the speeds at which those ticketed were traveling, said Maj. Randall Nichols, commanding officer of the Department of Public Safety’s operations division.

The number of speeders cited for speeding 26 to 29 mph above the limit increased by about 50 percent from 2000 to 2004, Nichols said. The number of speeders in the midrange of 16 to 25 mph above the limit is at a four-year high.

The number of highway fatalities has generally remained steady at about 200 annually in recent years, but state estimates show that two in five highway fatalities involve excessive speed.

State police are focusing attention on problem areas, sections of the interstate, turnpike, roads and intersections where there have been a high volume of accidents or where there have been high levels of aggressive driving.

“It really makes no sense to expend a lot of resources where we haven’t had a bad crash in years,” Nichols said.

Dubbed Operation SAFE, which stands for Strategic Area Focused Enforcement, the effort starts in the spring and runs through the peak travel times of the summer. Troopers have been given detailed maps of problem areas.

The average speed of motorists stopped by the state police in the air has risen by 5.3 mph since 1990. “That may not sound like much, but statistically that’s significant,” Nichols said.

Even slowing down by a few miles per hour can spell the difference between having an accident and avoiding one, he said.

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Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangornews.com

AP-ES-04-23-05 1624EDT