The measurement should be abolished altogether. Driver impairment should be done through field tests. If someone is capable of winning the Indy 500 with a BA of 2.0 then God bless em. If someone can’t keep a car centered on the road with a BA of .001 then they shouldn’t be driving.
“Encouraging” people to drive in a safer way never works. The only thing which works is enforcing the desired behaviour with fines, revocation of the driving license, jail, etc… When there are significant reductions of road deaths,it’s always as a result of the enforcement of a new law : mandatory seat belts, driving licenses with “points”, high fines, etc…
[anecdote] According to what I recently read the current world record for DUI is held by a Frenchman caught a couple months ago with 1.15 or so. The previous record belonged to a British guy. I guess most of us would be dead even before seating in the car with so much alcohol in the blood. [/anecdote]
Hijack : how much alcohol can you drink and live?
On Mythbusters sleep deprived and distracted drivers proved more dangerous than the .08 drivers. If I remember correctly they did at least two episodes on the subject. If someone gets caught texting and driving its a 300 dollar ticket tops. .05 DUI conviction is 10k dollar minimum, you might get away with only spending 3k if you beat the charge. That doesn’t really seem proportional to me.
Googling, I found two higher BAC : 1.4 and 1.48 . But both subsequently died. Wikipedia put the death mark at 0.4. I guess it answers my question.
Right. I would be a designated driver if my buddy is getting hammered. If we are having two beers, I’m not wasting my time being one. Do I follow him to his house, pick him up, drive him back to the bar, and then drive him home? What if he lives 15 miles away from me? For two beers? That is not a “plan for safety” it is a pointless exercise simply to be in compliance with a law that doesn’t affect anyone’s safety.
It would be too much of a damn hassle. Nobody would stop off for two beers anymore. Drinking would only be done in binge quantities because of the extra effort and expense needed to enjoy drinking.
It makes interesting reading, especially (pg.24):
"Although lowering the per se BAC threshold may seem counterintuitive when the majority of alcohol-impaired drivers in fatal crashes have BAC levels well over 0.08, research on the effectiveness of laws limiting BAC levels has found that lowering the per se BAC limit changes the drink-driving behavior of drivers at all BAC levels. "
In Australia and several European countries, going from 0.08 to 0.05 apparently reduced crashes by 8-12%.
Just to be clear, prohibition targeted selling, but not simple possession, of alcohol.
Not that that alters your argument, but just trying to keep the record straight, and that’s a common misunderstanding about prohibition in the US.
I don’t disagree with any of this. I’m sure that summary executions for DUI would curb traffic fatalities much more. I dispute the need for such legislation in a free country.
It reminds me of a story from the 1980s where one executive was lauded for saving an airline a million bucks a year or some such thing by eliminating one olive from each salad served during meals (Yeah, you youngsters don’t remember meals on planes). Everyone who talked about it thought the guy was a genius.
Then and now, I think he’s an idiot. Sure, eliminate an olive and save a million bucks. Save another million with the second olive, then the tomatoes, then the lettuce, then the meal entirely. Such a strategy isn’t genius, it’s nickel and diming.
In the same vein, lowering the DUI limit would of course help with crash levels. Same with lowering the speed limit to 55…and then 45, and 35, and 25 etc. Outlawing cars will eliminate all traffic deaths. The question should never be: “Will this save lives?” but at what level are we willing to jail, fine, punish, humiliate, and destroy future career chances? A guy that is .06 is not a danger to society and shouldn’t be in the above categories.
Don’t forget that the NTSB stands for the National Transportation Safety Board. They are not a legislative body. They cannot make rules or laws (unlike the FAA, for example). All they can do is make recommendations. Their recommendations are always based on what is best from a safety point of view. Balancing safety with other considerations such as freedom, economics, etc., is up to others who actually have the power to enact such regulations.
For example, after an airplane crash the NTSB does the investigation and sometimes makes recommendations for changes. But the FAA can choose to follow those recommendations or not. The FAA sets the rules which the airlines must follow.
How about you just don’t have two beers, then? Have a beer, then a Coke. Or have two beers, but hang out for longer. Invite your friend to your place for beers - hell, you can take turns driving the riding mower buzzed. You’re creating overly-tailored situations to exaggerate the inconvenience. “But I can’t have two beers, then immediately drive home.” Cry me a river. I’ll take the 8-12% crash reduction, thank you very much.
The point of lowering the legal limit is to make it so people do not drink alcohol and drive. Period. The problem is, as some people have pointed out, different people are at different levels of impairment at a given BAC. Some people are very dangerous at .08, some are only a tiny bit off their regular reflexes.
Trying to judge or measure BAC yourself is a fool’s game. As anybody with experience in either end of DUI enforcement can tell you, BAC can change RAPIDLY as your body metabolizes the alcohol. You could blow a .05 at the point you leave the bar and be up to a .1 20-30 minutes later as the alcohol in your stomach moves in to your bloodstream. The rate of absorption varies dramatically due to a host of situational and metabolic reasons.
This is why the goal is no drinking and driving. Two beers one night when you ate a ton of stuff at the bar might result in a .04 and another night when you had light food or no food and some other metabolic factors the same two beers could put you up towards a .08. Calculating a simple body weight to alcohol content ratio is not terribly accurate because the rate of absorption and the metabolic processing rate have such a severe impact on BAC.
As far as the cops just pulling you over for bad driving, well, they can already do that if you violate a traffic law. Roadside sobriety tests are pretty questionable in their effectiveness… some people have trouble with them sober, others are fine at them fairly drunk, it is not a surefire detection method. And since it is subjective, it can be disputed in court.
A simple, hard, low BAC # makes it simple. Do not drink and drive. Part of the whole problem with the .08 BAC is people think that they know what amount of drinking is safe to drive for them. People cannot accurately and reliably make this prediction, especially when drinking, as even small amounts of alcohol begin to affect judgment. The lower that BAC is, the more you take people’s self-analysis out of the equation.
The reason to have a BAC at .05 rather than a zero point is to prevent cases where somebody really hasn’t been drinking getting a DUI. There are a lot of reasons you could have a trace amount of alcohol in your system. There are virtually no ways to hit BAC .05 or higher other than consuming alcohol. A .05 BAC is basically a zero tolerance law adjusted with a reasonable margin of error.
As for folks saying that the lack of public transportation in this country make it impossible to go out and drink and safely get home… well, yes, that is true and it is a problem. There should be a lot more public transit options, and a lot of the zero tolerance countries DO have good public transit that make it very silly to drink and drive. But you can have a designated driver, you can drink at home, etc… likening strict DUI laws to prohibition is silly. It just means you need to plan some more when incorporating alcohol in to socializing.
This varies dramatically from state to state. Most states have a “diversion” program where you do not face criminal prosecution on a first offense DUI but instead pay fines (varies, OR where I live is in the $500-1000 range), your license is suspended (varies, I believe OR is 90 days first offense), and you are required to undergo an alcohol abuse counseling program at a state approved program (which you have to pay for out of pocket). The total out of pocket ends up being closer to $2K plus the cost and inconvenience of finding alternate transportation.
The conclusion from the ample evidence on texting and driving or talking on a cell phone, etc., should be that the punishment should be more commensurate with a DUI and involve loss of driving privileges. The reason “distracted driving” is more of a grey zone is that it’s more difficult to prove. A hard number BAC makes it very easy for the courts, you exceed the number you get the punishment. Just like speeding and radar guns. For distracted driving, the police must basically build a court case with photo evidence to back it up, or they have to just go with “because the officer said so” which obviously opens the book to a lot of potential abuse of power.
Same reason that relying on roadside sobriety tests is problematic. Say that the officer gives you a DUI based on his personal assessment of your sobriety. It becomes your word against the officer if it goes to court. If you already feel that the police is hassling people with DUI arrests, do you really want them to basically just write you up based on “because I said so?” It’s bad for everybody except lawyers. It opens the police to a bunch more paperwork and court disputes and general waste of their time, and it opens the public to more potential for police harassment or frivolous arrests to create revenue. It’s better for everybody involved when there is a quantitative measure that punishment is based upon rather than it being entirely subjective.
I appreciate your honesty. I wish the debate could be about this instead of .1, .08, or .05. When the argument to lower the limit to .08 was being proposed it was sworn up and down that it wasn’t a zero-tolerance measure, but people on my side pointed out the slippery slope that was put in motion. At least you admit the goal is no alcohol at all. Try to sell that to the public instead of taking baby steps.
The rate of drunk driving fatalities in the US has dropped by roughly half since 1990. I get my data from second-hand articles that quote data compiled by the CDC and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
I cannot directly cite the CDC or the NHTSA because no matter how hard I strive to confirm their data, all I get are statistics about how many fatalities occurred last year. These statistics are accompanied by rhetoric meant to persuade me that drunk driving fatalities are not a good thing.
No shit, but what about the trends over time? These trends would be of some use in determining whether the current laws are adequate, or need tweaking.
Well, yes. The goal is to have drivers have no alcohol in the system at all, and yes, it’s disingenous to talk about a .05 alcohol level as anything but a zero-tolerance measure. As I said, the only reason to even have the .04-.06 is that the readings below that are so open to variables as to be virtually meaningless.
The big problem with .08 or .1 is that people constantly, routinely, try to self-evaluate whether they are within the legal limit. And fail. I’ve read estimates that the average person that receives a DUI has driven over the legal limit roughly 200 times before receiving a DUI, which is consistant with my personal experience from myself and friends. A law where people try to evaluate whether or not they are too drunk to drive has an inherent flaw. Subjective measurements are inherently flawed.
I’d argue that you basically have to go to one of two extremes - either a zero-tolerance policy for BAC (.05 or lower) or to only serve a DUI to people if they commit a traffic violation after drinking. The problem with only arresting if a traffic violation occurs is that often that first traffic violation that an officer witnesses is because it resulted in an accident. The whole goal of the law is to prevent people from driving while intoxicated. The reason they have changed the ad campaigns to “driving buzzed is driving drunk” is to hammer home that once you have made the decision to have a few drinks without an arranged ride home, the ship has pretty much sailed on you self-regulating yourself - either you are so drunk that the bartender or friends intervene, or you drive.
Ask yourself this simple question, if you regularly have a few drinks and drive. How many times have you felt a little bit under the influence coming out of the bar or on the drive home? How many of those times have you reacted to this by saying “whoa, gotta call a cab/friend/catch a bus” vs. just deciding to drive anyway? I know that I made that call time and again and never called that cab because I couldn’t afford it. Once I started to feel buzzed, it was too late… I needed to get home, not leave my car at a bar and catch a bus or cab.
The current legal limit is kind of a fool’s game. Zero tolerance would be a lot more honest, and there’s plenty of research to suggest that it would affect people’s decision making strategy on when to drink and when to drive, which is the goal. In the interest of not ruining people’s lives for a relatively minor mistake, you could institute a “One strike penalty” for a 1st time offender DUI w/no accident or injury involved and a BAC under .08. Make it a non-felony with a hefty fine and short license suspension and such, enough to be a serious deterence but not derail an otherwise good person’s life. Second minor offense, higher BAC, or minor accident no injury result in first full DUI with the current punitive penalties, fines, license suspension, and diversion programs in place now. Step up from there in the way states do now, with long-term suspension of license and major fines/imprisonment, mandatory treatment required for reinstatement of license, etc.
And yes, improve the freaking public transportation system.
Field tests are not particularly accurate. In my state, only three of them (Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus, One Legged Stand, and Heel-Toe Walk) can be used to determine probable cause to require a breath test. They can’t be used as proof of impairment, with good reason—the HGN test doesn’t work real well for people that have a stigmatism, One Legged Stand is invalid for obese people, etc.
If a people are incapable of taking any of the tests then they can blow into a little tube.
So what is the change you want implemented again? 
Nup won’t work as it then becomes a subjective matter. No laws should be subjective as it will lead to corruption.