By Rich Schneider & Leslie Wells

AAA estimates 36.6 million people will hit the road this Memorial Day weekend, a 4.7 percent increase from last year. With more people driving to their destinations, Indiana State Police and many local departments will also increase their patrols to keep Hoosiers safe.
Many of those troopers and officers will be working to ensure drivers and passengers alike are buckled up and staying safe on the roads. In 2016, 46,885 people in passenger vehicles in Indiana were hurt or killed in traffic collisions; 12 percent of them were not properly restrained.
Those numbers represent a fraction of the information analyzed by the IU Public Policy Institute for its ongoing traffic safety study. Dona Sapp, PPI’s principal investigator on the project, has spent more than a dozen years evaluating the many contributing factors to the more than 200,000 traffic crashes that occur annually in Indiana.