There’s a small taxi company in a small town near me. People use it during the day I guess to go places when they don’t have access to their car (in the shop).
They also provide service for public schools where there are just a few kids in an area, not enough for a bus.
ETA: my 9 pm guess was generous. From their website:
Regular taxi service 7am to 5pm Monday thru Friday in the following towns and surrounding townships Vandergrift, Apollo, Leechburg, New Kensington, Arnold, Lower Burrell, Freeport, Natrona, Natrona Heights, Brackenridge, and Tarentum.
There’s a “joke” that is pervasive amongst law enforcement that I’ve dealt with that states that the only people driving at 3 am are cops, Uber drivers, and drunks.
So, If you are pulled over during the wee hours of the morning, and are not ferrying passengers around, don’t be surprised that the police are going to begin the encounter presuming that you are intoxicated.
The small Saskatchewan town where I grew up had two bars and no cabs. I remember visiting my grandmother in the larger town where she lived, 40 miles away, and taking a cab with her. Big city!
If you had a law that there could only be bars in towns with cabs, most of rural Saskatchewan would be dry.
It may have something to do with the fact that in much of Canada, for about half the year trying to walk home could kill you, especially if you’re drunk and possibly disoriented.
sleeping it off in the back seat is a fair compromise between public safety and personal safety.
You would think there would be a bar-hired “designated driver” in each of these cases (a very part-time portion of their job, I assume). Just put the car fee on their bar tab. Designated drivers means repeat business!
And if the designated driver, an employee of the bar, gets in an accident while driving them home, the bar is potentially liable. I doubt most bar owners would want to run that risk.
Plus, if the point is that there are no cabs, how does the designated driver get back to the bar?
Depends on where they are parking. Many cities have laws against it.
If they are living in their car, they either know how to stealth camp, know where it is legal to do so, or they get interrupted in their sleep often by a cop telling them to move it along.
I was surprised to see that about 20 states allow for DUI on a bicycle. In my state it has to be a motor vehicle. There has to be a motor for it to be a DUI.
I wonder if it would be treated differently if the conviction was from New Jersey. Here it’s a traffic offense (with serious consequences) not a criminal conviction.
As to the definition of operating this has been recently re-affirmed in my state. Here is the case and it cites multiple other previous decisions if anyone is interested.
Nope. It’s the description of the offence that matters. If it would be a Criminal Code offence in Canada, doesn’t matter what the place where the offence occurred called it. There’s a need for uniformity at the border, plus, Canadian border control officers can’t be expected to know how each of the 50 states treats the offence, as well as how other countries in the world treat it.
Neither one of those things is “doing the right thing”. Doing the right thing is either having alternate transportation or not drinking to excess. The OWI laws in most states are pretty explicit that you are not to be inside a vehicle with the ability to operate it (possession of the keys) if you are intoxicated. And those laws give police very little discretion presently. It’s not like 30+ years ago when we we sometimes could get or give a drunk a ride after finding them in their vehicle. Doesn’t work like that any more. So don’t get bucky at the cops about it.
I won’t join those that say if you don’t like it try to get the laws changed. With how many people we have killed by drunk drivers in this country I don’t see any reason not to be draconian about this. It’s real easy to avoid an OWI/DWI pinch! I have been to many accidents that were caused by goddamned drunks. It’s a horrible scene especially when innocents are killed. During my first career as a Dep when I was on the highway it happened almost every night.
And, BTW, everyone on these boards knows I like to imbibe on my personal time. But I do so at home and stay the fuck away from my vehicles.
Exactly that argument was made by one of the MPs in the Canadian Parliament when this provision was put in force in the 1950s. The answer was that “care or control” is defined by the Criminal Code, and this situation would not be caught by the provision.
Tony “I’m a Hall of Famer” La Russa’s SUV was running when cops found it at the side of the road with damage. I seem to recall cases where passed-out drunks were found in vehicles with fresh-appearing damage parked (sometimes badly) with the engine turned off.
It sounds legitimate to cite those people for a DUI too.
Maybe there are legions of people who innocently sleep off a drunk in the back seat of their car. In the instances I’ve heard about* they’re dozing in the driver’s seat.
