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Abilene's Police Department (APD) announced recently that they are cracking down on traffic enforcement and will be issuing tickets and pulling over traffic violators. This is all because the recent numbers of car crashes in Abilene are up drastically.

According to the APD's last press release, we Abilenians have not been paying attention and have been careless, or could it be that the last three winter storms have happened since the first of the year, thus causing more car crashes.

To be exact since January first the traffic enforcement division of the APD has responded to more than 1,000 crashes and all have occurred inside the city limits of Abilene. While inclement weather conditions may have been a contributing factor, our overall driving may be the problem.

According to the press release just issued the Abilene Police Department says in an effort to “curb dangerous driving behaviors” and decrease crashes, they will increase staffing during peak traffic hours. Yep during morning and afternoon drive times.

Interestingly enough four of the over 1,000 crashes were deadly and that is a drastic increase in auto crashes for Abilene. The Abilene Traffic Commander urges Abilenians to slow down and look around and always drive with caution.

Several major contributing factors according to the Texas Department of Transportation (TXDoT) says to stay off your cell phones when driving, cool the road rage, don't tailgate, do not change lanes without signaling, and do not run stop signs and red lights.

The Abilene Police Dept. asks all Abilenians to comply with all traffic laws to avoid being ticketed or worse yet be involved in a crash.

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LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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