The “Take Back Our Highways” campaign for the Thanksgiving holidays will save lives.

All available law enforcement officers in Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi will be on the roads in a three-state effort to enforce speed limits during the period Nov. 19-25.

The long Thanksgiving holiday weekend gives more people time to travel greater distances than they can at other times. As a result, more people take to the highways and more tend to speed so they may cover more miles.

Concentrated enforcement is effective. A five-day state trooper blitz in August resulted in motorists receiving 26,126 tickets for speeding.

But like a sermon from a revival preacher, the message tends to wear off if no one sticks around to do follow-up work.

The governor made a big to-do about the number of mishaps at Birmingham’s malfunction junction last spring. The state lowered interstate speed limits approaching the junction from 60 mph to 50 mph and began strict enforcement.

Speeds dropped, as did the number of accidents.

The lower limits are still posted but motorists are back to speeding.

Alabama needs more troopers on the highways around the clock to have long-term impact on highway safety. That, of course, will require the Legislature to appropriate more money to the Department of Public Safety.

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