Eleven people died on Maine roads between Dec. 20 and Dec. 28, with the Christmas Eve crash in Poland accounting for six of those dead. The other wrecks were in Dayton, Calais, Waterville, Naples and Winthrop.

The highway death toll for the year, as of Thursday, was 185 people. That’s 16 more than last year, which was one of the safest years on Maine roads.

Police have taken notice and, in their dedication to public safety, have been and will be out in force and on the alert for drunken drivers, speeders and drivers who are operating without a valid license. State Police Chief Col. Craig Poulin has assigned additional patrols, as have other police departments statewide. In addition to the road patrols, State Police will be flying two planes over the weekend.

“State Police will do all we can to end 2006 as safe as possible,” Poulin said. “Drivers need to avoid drinking and driving, hosts need to provide nonalcoholic beverages, and every vehicle should have a designated driver.”

Of the 169 highway deaths last year, 32.5 percent of them were the result of drunken drivers. That’s up a bit from the 30.9 percent of highway deaths caused by drunks in 2004, and down from the 2003 drunken driving deaths.

For the past decade, about a third of all the deaths on Maine roads have come at the hands of drunken drivers. While termed accidents, a drunken driving death is anything but accidental. The drunks and the folks serving the drunks have made decisions to drive and serve, and those bad decisions kill good people.

While the 2006 numbers are gruesome, Maine has made progress since 1982 when more than half of all highway deaths were caused by drunken drivers.

There’s more.

“A community effort is needed to get suspended drivers off the road. Police will do their part,” Poulin said, “but we need the help of others to report when a suspended driver is behind the wheel.”

Last year, police charged more than 2,000 drivers for operating after suspension of their driver’s license. There are about 932,500 licensed drivers in Maine, so 2,000 tickets issued to drivers with suspended licenses might now seem statistically significant. However, police say there are thousands more people out there driving with suspended licenses or driving without ever having earned a license at all, but we don’t know who they are unless they’re stopped for a traffic violation or involved in an accident.

And, then, there are the speeders – people driving too fast for road conditions or just plain too fast. Thousands of tickets are issued to these drivers, and the speeding never seems to wane as we rush through the day.

Police, statisticians and public safety advocates can drone on and on about the cost of crashes at the hands of drunken drivers, suspended drivers and speeders in terms of hospitalizations, court fees, jail time and fines, and much of that droning is too easily tuned out. What we simply cannot ignore is the real cost of bad driving and deadly accidents: the blood and tears of the people we love.

Poulin is right to pledge that State Police will do all they can to keep us safe. County and local police officers across the state will do the same.

Yet enforcement alone isn’t enough.

Each of us, as drivers, passengers, parents and friends, must take responsibility for the safety of our roads by keeping keys out of the hands of drunken drivers, reporting drivers who get behind the wheel without a license, and obeying the speed limit.

That way, we can best protect those we love.