So if those people went to a bar and then continued drinking in the car to put themselves over the legal limit, then they can be charged, no?
In a free society, I look with disdain on prohibitions that are in and of themselves not dangerous, but prohibited because “we just know” that you are going to take the next step.
My point is that sometimes it is preferable to have a bright line drawn in law on certain matters, even if the line can fairly be called arbitrary.
For example, enforcement of no drinking while driving has the benefit of being very straightforward, even if someone may not be drunk at that particular moment. Other examples of this principle is the speed limit (there’s nothing magical about any speed limit, but having a line drawn somewhere makes life easier for everyone) and establishing an age of majority (nothing magical about age 18 as opposed to 17 1/2 or whatever).
Do this in Washington state and you’ll get two tickets–open container AND distracted driving. You can’t drink ANYTHING while you’re driving, nor eat anything either. So there you go.
Exactly. Because at no time and no place has there ever been any example of people rules lawyering and dancing right up to the line and playing “I’m not touching you!” Never happens. Not anywhere.
For ease of administration we cannot determine whether someone driving at 69mph or 71mph is doing so safely. We cannot determine if someone 17 years, 11 months is mature enough to enter a contract as opposed to someone 18 years, 1 day.
We can, however, determine if someone drinking a beer in his car is too impaired to drive according to another arbitrary 0.08 limit. If someone is too drunk to drive, does it matter where he or she drank the booze? Conversely, if someone is not too drunk to drive, why does it matter if he is drinking in the car?
None of this addresses why a passenger shouldn’t be able to drink.
Am I misunderstanding your post or are you misreading that chart ?
A gown man of 180lbs would only be .024 BAC if he had 2 regular beers in an hour. Just a bit over 1/4 of the legal limit.
And let me tell you about the legal limit: 95% of the drunk drivers I have arrested have been over .14. Since the limit was lowered I have only tagged one that was lower than .10 (the old limit) and that woman was .097. In my experience people are not typically showing obvious impairment until .10 and they are not showing significant impairment until .12. .08 has not really solved much as the average drunk driver is almost always way higher than that!
Except that someone drinking in the car is going to have their BAC going UP as they travel, whereas someone who stopped drinking in the restaurant is usually going to have their BAC going DOWN as they travel. Considering the fact that drunk driving literally kills people, there really isn’t a compelling reason to embrace risk in this area.
The issues of passengers drinking is a reasonable one to think about. But in the big scheme of things, in the style of Elon Musk, I declare I to be a boring question and don’t wish to talk about it.
I’d agree that legislation ostensibly designed to promote health/safety but which has the primary goal of making money can backfire. Example: red light cameras at intersections, which have been viewed as a money tree by municipalities, leading to abuses which in Ohio led to the legislature banning them unless a cop is present (which effectively stopped their use). The result is that dangerous intersections which could be made safer by the cameras don’t have them.
Opponents of health/safety laws often seem to be saying that they "should be tailored to allow activities that I enjoy and don’t wanna be restricted from performing regardless of hazards to others, so I fling around terms like “nanny state to demean them.”
I’ll assume that’s serious though ridiculous enough to be a joke given the previous discussion.
Being drunk is not useful or productive in the same sense that communicating is. If the discussion gets stuck on that, then it’s just a ridiculous discussion.
Assuming it doesn’t get stuck on some sophistic argument that ‘someone could believe it’s just as useful to be drunk as communicate’, are you saying hands free phone use could realistically be banned? Forget ‘studies’ for a moment, as a practical issue. It is actually possible to largely rein in drunk driving. Because the public and people one by one can be convinced it’s wrong to endanger others by driving drunk. You’re just never going to convince enough people of that in case of HANDS FREE phoning. Or to take the other example, speed limits. We did a big national experiment proving you can’t enforce a 55 mph speed limit nationally. Too large a % of people think that’s an unfavorable trade off, even if Congress was able to pass it in haste. You could probably show that 55 reduces deaths, as well as fuel consumption. But there has to be a strong consensus in favor of laws for them to be enforceable, not just 50%+1 it takes (at least in some case) to pass them. Banning hands free phoning in cars, not enforceable.
Heh.
Who was that guy about ten, fifteen years ago, who was asking why he shouldn’t be allowed to play with his Heathkit breadboard circuits on an airliner?
Unfortunately the state supreme court struck down that law, so the scameras are back in many cities. (And “could” is doing a lot of work in the last sentence.)
Red light cameras make intersections more dangerous, not less.
The productivity argument is a non-starter. Just as people drive poorly when they’re using a cell phone, I think it’s likely they converse poorly when they’re driving. You have an important business call to make? Pull over and devote your full attention to it. People aren’t good at multi-tasking.
Even if you could make some routine phone calls, I think overall the minutes of extra productivity gained by making phone calls while driving would be cancelled out by the days and weeks of productivity lost by a single car accident.
I don’t have a cite, but there was an assumption built in from the get-go that the cellular system would have to be able to handle frequent handoffs of a moving cellphone from one cell to the next.
The reason I know this is that at the beginning of the 1980s, I was a paralegal for a DC law firm with a substantial communications law practice. They were in the early stages of planning the cellular networks back then, and I spent a bit of time at the FCC offices on M Street, photocopying documents concerning this bit of then-futuristic tech, and bringing them back to the lawyers. (Most of what I did as a paralegal back then can now be done with a click or two. Weird thought.) Since identifying the documents in the first place involved skimming through files of documents, it was hard not to absorb a good deal about what was going on.
If someone is running late to a meeting I’d rather they call ahead rather than exceed to speed limit to get there.
Every scenario on this will be different dpending on how much actual time passes. But generally you are incorrect. The person who drank at the bar will always have a higher BAC than the person who drinks the same amount over the same time period while driving.
It takes time for consumed alcohol to be pocessesed and enter the blood stream. And it takes about 2 hours per ounce of ethanol consumed to exit the blood stream. So someone who drank the 2 beers at a bar prior to driving is going to have a higher BAC than someone who drank the same amount while driving the same amount of time. The drivers BAC won’t peak until after they get home while the bar drinkers BAC will peak in the middle of the drive.
Either way, the highest a grown man of 180lbs BAC will get is .024 which is nothing to be concerned about for most people. So the debate question is what does it matter when/where the alcohol has been consumed?
This is true but it wasn’t really to deal specifically with cars (though the engineers realized this was going to be an issue). The original cellular network tests were in the middle of cities, where it was more likely to involve people walking from cell to cell. The technical issue is that network cells must necessarily overlap, so there has to be some way of “handing off” a phone from one tower to another in an intelligent manner. If a person stays in the overlap zone for a while, hopefully the towers aren’t just swapping back and forth all the time, which would be a waste of time and resources (and degrade your performance to boot). We have a related but entirely different problem now with air travel and towers getting and losing phones much more quickly than envisioned back then.
Why can’t they pull over to make that call?
Good points all.
During rush hour, the traffic here (when it can) routinely does 75 in zones that are officially 55 mph. The way I see it, during rush hour getting out of the way of the people in back of you as fast as you can is a public service.