School is back and with a new school year, it is timely to remind ourselves of the importance of safe driving and safe parking in and around our schools.

Our officers will be patrolling school zones in the region.

School zones operate between 8-9.30am and 2.30-4pm.

A 40km/h speed limit applies during these times.

Increased penalties apply to both driving and parking offences in school zones.

In particular, demerit points now apply for parking offences within a school zone.

The parking areas in all our school zones are well sign posted, so there should be no excuses for finding yourself in the wrong place.

Remember, you are not permitted to stop within a bus zone at anytime, even to drop off passengers. 

Over the Australia Day long weekend period, all our available police were out and about targeting road safety, conducting thousands of RBT and drug tests on drivers using our roads.

In fact, our police conducted the most breath tests compared to the rest of the Southern Region of NSW.

I am very happy to say there were no serious collisions and no one lost their life on our roads during this period.

This is a big improvement on the Christmas period, so the message must be getting through to some extent.

Still there were a few buffoons caught drinking a driving, and driving with drugs in their system.

However, the vast majority did the right thing and got home safely without us needing to stop them!

Until next week, stay safe.