Wichita ? Kansas drivers who take chances when they share the road with tractor-trailers are the targets of a new campaign by the Kansas Highway Patrol.

Troopers are riding with truckers throughout Kansas during the seven-week campaign looking for careless or distracted motorists in smaller vehicles. Information on careless drivers is communicated to a nearby trooper, who makes the stop.

KAKE-TV in Wichita reported troopers wrote more than 150 tickets and issued more than 1,000 verbal warnings in the first two weeks of the campaign.

Highway Patrol statistics for 2008 showed semitrailer trucks were involved in 5.6 percent of all Kansas crashes. But those crashes accounted for nearly 15 percent of all highway deaths in the state.