A little off topic, but still relevant: I have a few friends who are LEOs. One of them told me once that after midnight, there’s a certain percentage of drivers on the road that are legally “impaired” by alcohol or drugs. I don’t remember the percentage specifically, but I remember I was surprised by how large it was. I want to say it was 60% or something similar.
My husband had several years of experience driving a cab on the night shift. He said to be wary of “bar break”–between about 1:45 and 2:30, as the bars closed at 2 and that’s when those drivers were on the road and it was noticeable. And the cops know this too. I had a friend who worked at a bar and she is a terrible driver. She was stopped many times going home from work, but always let off. I don’t know why. Terrible driving is terrible driving and should be curtailed no matter the reason. She was even stopped a couple of times when she was actually drunk–when her driving, though still bad, was a little better. Think “too careful” here. And she charmed her way out of it. I, on the other hand, have only gotten stopped a couple of times, at that hour, and never when I’d been drinking.
That depends what is meant by “fine”. Certainly thousands of people successfully drive from point A to B under various states of intoxication daily without causing crashes, much of the time they are apparently not even noticeable. Certainly a given individual will not be able to drive as well when they are under different levels of influence, but one’s ability to drive doesn’t instantly disappear. Here I think “fine” means good enough based on conditions at the time not to cause an accident or be noticeably erratic and get pulled over. I’d say the amount of traffic and ease of the route and how well you know it would have an influence on the degree of ability required not to have an accident.
Everyone who drives is aware that the safety of rash, ill-judging, impaired, or otherwise lesser drivers is based on the predictable, law-abiding behavior of the other drivers on the road. Not by their belief in their abilities.
What habitual drunk drivers don’t want to admit is that under circumstances anything less than optimal (created by others, not them), they could not manage to keep themselves from disaster, because they physically and mentally are incapable of it.
If there is one solid fact I know about drunk drivers, it’s that they are delusional about their own abilities. It is a matter of certainty, to the degree that multiple scientific studies coming to the same conclusions creates certainty, that drunk drivers who think they drive fine while drunk are wrong. They do not. They can’t. It’s physically impossible.
It’s not very individually variable, either, except in a straight body-weight to alcohol ratio over time kind of way.
It doesn’t go by how much practice you’ve had driving drunk, or how convincing you think you are to other people. If you get home in one piece you are lucky and if you don’t kill or maim some innocent person, luckier still.
Whether you get caught has nothing to do with those facts.
Like many others, drink driving was normal not that many years ago and I did it too. I never drove when I was fall-down drunk (and really haven’t been fall-down drunk but a handfull of times anyway), but I’ve drove buzzed plenty of times a few decades ago. I never had any incidents or close calls. Just drove down the road feeling good and a little more careful than usual. But, had there been something I needed to suddenly react to, my reaction times would have probably been worse than if I was dead sober.
I really have no idea how accurate your 25% estimate is, but I think it is too high. I am certain, however, that the percentage is a lot lower now than in the 70s and 80s. Uber, Lyft and designated drivers are now widely used, and most people are pretty cognizant of not driving drunk.
On the other hand, lowering the legal BAC limit from 0.15 to 0.12 to 0.10 to 0.08 has made criminals out of a lot of people who wouldn’t have been legally drunk years ago. Personally, and this is just my opinion (but one shared by at least some honest cops), I think they’ve gone overboard with lowering the alcohol limit. The drunk drivers who are serious problems, and who are repeat offenders, usually have levels of over 0.15, and often over 0.20.
Is that the stat for Gahanna, Ohio?
Given the enthusiasm of the G(e)h(e)nna Gestapo*, I’d wager the odds of drunk drivers there getting cited at way higher than 1 in 666.
**It’s the fiery pit of hell as far as speed traps go, definitely.
My most sordid drunk driving story did not result in an arrest, although I should have been.
I was driving home from Cincinnati into Northern Kentucky at about 7AM, plastered out of my skull. I took the onramp way, WAY too fast and lost the car, causing me to hit the curb at near highway speeds. This onramp was onto the 471 bridge across the Ohio River.
Needless to say, I popped both my front tires and absolutely panicked. I had to get home, had to get away…
So I was driving on rims on the front wheels in a front drive car with sparks shooting all over the place. I had my hazards on too. I couldn’t quite manage full highway speeds because the car was almost undriveable control-wise.
I recall as I was crossing the bridge a family in a minivan, all staring at me driving this sparking, flasher blinking car. They looked like they were on their way to church. I smiled at them and waved. This was also before the massive proliferation of cell phones.
I somehow escaped detection, got home, and passed out. When I awoke at 3PM, I had no memory of what had happened. I went out to my car for something and saw the damage. I was like “Oh, shit!”. The rims had left grooves on the asphalt from my apartment entrance to where I’d parked. I moved the car to avoid detection.
When I finally got it towed and filed the insurance claim, I had done $3500 worth of damage to the front end, steering, suspension, wheels and tires. This was in like 1997.
I have a good friend who was a raging alcoholic for most of her 20s. She got into AA, and has been sober for more than 25 years. But when she was drinking, she racked up a lot of DUIs. Only one was for an actual accident, and it was just a fender bender. The rest were check-points, bar stake-outs, and driving erratically. The couple of times she was driving erratically, she was so toasted, she actually got arrested and taken into jail to sober up, and had to appear before a judge before she could go home. At the sobriety check-points, they gave her a ticket, drove her home in a police car, and impounded her car, so she had to pay to get her car back, as well as pay the ticket. I’m not sure how the bar stake-outs played out.
The “driving erratically” ones were times where she had actually done something that had been a ticketable offense even if she’d been sober, like crossing the line, speeding up above the limit, then slowing down, to below the minimum, repeatedly, or running a stop sign.
She was in rehab a few times, and got several “one month” chips, before AA finally took. But she only got one “one year” chip, which is to say that once she had made it that long once, she never relapsed. She was sober eight years before the last points fell off her license, though.
Anyway, she never actually lost her license, but she was once restricted to driving to work and back for a period of six months. I think it was that, that was her wake up call that she really had a serious problem.
Now, understand, she drove drunk practically ever night of the week for about seven years, and got caught maybe a dozen times. But my point is, only one time was for an accident. The rest were all cops trolling for drunk drivers. This was back in the 1980s, when MADD was a new organization, and drunk driving was the cause du jour. I don’t know whether people are more serious about ferreting our impaired driver now, or were then. There was a brief time when people were just all about it, and a DA could get elected with a “tough on drunk driving” campaign, but then it faded a little-- still people are much more serious about it now than any time before the 1980s. So I imagine there are still lots of stings now.
TL;DR: someone I know who drove drunk almost every day in the 80s got stopped mainly in stings, and not because of accidents.
When I was growing up in Toronto, I never heard of anyone getting a DUI. You had to try hard to get the attention of the police.
I moved to a small town in the late 70’s, and it seems everyone was getting DUI. It was a small town, there was not much traffic later in the evening and not much open, so it was pretty good odds that anyone on the road late was coming from a bar. Plus, the police got to know the regulars and who was who, so an unfamiliar vehicle was worth pulling over to check out. So many people I knew or knew of came there from big cities where it was safe to drive mildly impaired because you never got pulled over - and were shocked to get a DUI conviction within a few weeks of arriving and regularly driving home from the bar. Except for my roommate’s brother, who a few weeks after his release from jail, borrowed his brother’s car, sideswiped a dumpster on the way home, parked and went inside to sleep it off. When the police came the next morning, he was sober and all they could get him for was leaving the scene of an accident.
The one time I got pulled over - I was designated driver and the car belonged to a guy with 3 DUI convictions, which I’m sure the cops knew - the one cop actually sprinted to the police station a block and a half to retrieve a portable breathalyzer. They were so disappointed I’m sure when I blew 0.0.
you can get a DUI for going outside to warm up the car for your designated driver. Just don’t fall asleep in the driver’s seat while the engine is running.
My recollection is that they were somewhat more common back in the late 90s, early 00s. At least in the western burbs of Chicago where I lived. Around that time, MADD was becoming more prominent, and many states were lowering the blood alcohol level.
Don’t think they are as common now (or at least, I haven’t heard of them.)
In a mandated drunk-driver class I was informed that on average most convicted DUIs have gotten away with it over 250 times before they were caught.
On average. A lot of non-drinkers draw attention the first time they try, while dedicated alcoholics drive hither and yon every day without anyone the wiser.
Yes this seems like other ‘odds’ questions like the chance of being murdered, varies extremely widely based on personal circumstances. A general stat might be useful to gauge the problem from the whole society’s POV (how many people are getting murdered, how effective is enforcement of drunk driving laws in general), but not necessarily very relevant from a particular individual’s POV.
I’ve known some ‘dedicated alcoholic’ types who were drunk a large % of the time, and needed to drive. So they drove drunk. And were never caught in years. Very different than some of the anecdotes above where people were lucky not to be caught even that once. For some well practiced, functional drink-at-home alcoholics it’s pretty different.
Also, for casual drinkers, while I have no problem with lowered BAC legal standards (I never drive if I’d had anything, though you don’t have to drive where I live) a lot of people aren’t that impaired at those levels, to give visible evidence to the police if it’s not a bar stake out or a check point*. Society draws a line somewhere as it must. It doesn’t mean the risk posed by .08% people who hold their liquor well is the same as people blasted out of their minds who cause head-ons at 100mph. Though science says, their abilities have been reduced.
*I have never run into a DUI checkpoint personally (mostly driving in NY area).
I was ninja’d by jz78817. I’ve seen many questions regarding the odds of something happening when there is no randomness involved and it always irks me. Even if getting stopped/arrested for DUI was random, the odds would still be l unknowable since you can’t be certain as to how many times people drive drunk. The best that you can hope for is some sort of estimate and even they vary by an order of magnitude (and more).
I almost got one in 2013 for driving while black, and I’m not black and I wasn’t drinking. I got back from a week and a half vacation in Bermuda and was cue ball bald and very very tan. I live in rural PA where a black man in a car is something of a unicorn, so I was pulled over after work on a Friday afternoon. The officer was short of shocked when he realized I wasn’t black and told me I was pulled over for driving erratically. I skied what was erratic about going the speed limit in a straight line in a safe manner. He asked me if I had been drinking, and I told him I didn’t answer questions. He then asked me to step out of the car for a field sobriety check, and I told him I would exercise my right, and refuse any field tests or breathilizer and opt for a blood test at the hospital if he thought I was impaired. I had been told that this put off most policemen and they would send you on your way without further delay.
Not so much.
He had another policeman come and they took me to the hospital for a blood test. I hadn’t been drinking.
So, i would add to the thread and say that being black and/or uncooperative with the police will increase the chance.
I don’t know if its true or not, but I’ve heard stories of people getting DUIs for working on their cars in their driveways, and people getting a DUI for going out to their car and getting something that was sitting on the passenger seat.
I don’t know the technical requirements from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
The closest I have ever come to getting one was when I was sleeping in my SUV in the passenger seat. An officer woke me up by knocking on the window and demanded to know if I had been drinking. I answered “Yes” and that was why I was there instead of somewhere else. His eyes lit up for a potential bust and demanded I hand over my keys. I didn’t have them. I had already put them under a rock about 50 yards away because I knew the Massachusetts rules well. He demanded that I show them where they were and I made him get them himself after I showed him where they were and I didn’t touch them because he was just itching to get me for a DUI or anything else and was irritated that he couldn’t. He eventually just had to give up.
I am not proud of that episode but some cops are just assholes. If someone needs to sleep it off in their car rather than rushing home while driving, that is a preferable outcome. They shouldn’t be going out of their way to bust people that are trying to do the right thing.
Yes, I think there was an earlier thread - but the general rule in most jurisdictions is they don’t want to argue over what constitutes the “D” in DUI. So if you are in the car, with the keys, it’s DUI whether you are driving or sleeping in the back seat; no hair splitting “I haven’t started the car” or “the car was not running when you found me” etc. You are “in control of the vehicle” which satisfies the definition of DUI. After all, even if you intended to sleep it off in the back seat - drunk people have been known to do weird things - waking up and deciding to drive home while in a stupor would not be unusual; and the police aren’t about to sit around waiting to see if you put the car in gear. Go key? Get charge.
The “D” in DUI depends on the verbiage in the statute. Some are real specific. e.g. “in vehicle in possession of key is driving for the purposes of this section.” Others are more vague and depend more on case law.
For sure as various legislatures keep revisiting this stuff to lower the limits if nothing else they also tend to add precision (though not necessarily common sense) to the definitions. It’s much cheaper to enforce and prosecute crimes with bright line definitions than it is crimes with “I know it when I see it” definitions.
There’s also opportunities for legal fun with the definition of “vehicle”. See Another Thing You Can’t (Legally) Drive Drunk: Wheelchair – Lowering the Bar No RUI Charge for Florida Drunkard – Lowering the Bar Further Analysis Regarding RUI (Riding Under the Influence) – Lowering the Bar et al.