So, I’m making plans for a night out drinking beer and singing karaoke with some friends this weekend. Of course, I live in the U.S., so the question has to arise: Who will be the designated driver? Unless we all take cabs (expensive where I live), someone’s gotta do it, right?
However, I used to live in Japan, and there, they have a system called “daiko.” Basically, you and your friends drive yourselves wherever you’re going and get drunk. Then you call the daiko taxi, and it arrives with both a driver and a passenger inside. The passenger then drives your car home with you in it while his buddy follows. Once safely home, the passenger gets back into the original cab, and everyone’s home safely. These taxis cost more than a regular cab, but they cost less than a cab ride to and from the venue would cost.
Great idea, I say! Why don’t we have them in the U.S.? Is it some sort of insurance thing? Do these exist in other countries?
I know I’ve heard of at least one taxi service that tosses a scooter into the trunk and drives your car home, and then departs on the scooter. A Google search shows this one, even though it’s not the one I was thinking of.
I’m thinking that there are probably some liability problems with driving unknown people’s cars. Certainly one could not guarantee the safety of an arbitrary car.
Around here every Christmas season we have a thing called Operation Red Nose, where you call the number, and then volunteers will show up and drive you home in your car (and then leave in their car). In BC the insurance is provided by ICBC, the government insurance company and is completely separate from the owner’s insurance, but I’ve seen this program in other provinces too. That’s the only one I know of for sure, and it’s only on weekends in November and December, but I’ve heard of other companies that do it year round.
I also don’t imagine that it would be too difficult for a company providing this service to get an insurance policy that would cover the clients’ cars.
A company here tried it for a while (both the passenger in the cab and the scooter one), but the trouble is that it in practice it often becomes such a logistical hassle that it ends up taking significantly longer than a normal pickup-dropoff call. Since most of your driving drunks home business comes in the hour or two around closing time, that’s when cabs need to be working the most efficiently and trying to work out logistics with drunks just isn’t very condusive to that.
I suspect that the city in Japan in question doesn’t have a last call, so there isn’t that mad rush and so it’s not a big deal if things take a little longer.
Where I used to live, on/around certain holidays (like Christmas and Thanksgiving), the city would pay for cab fare if you were leaving a bar and said you were intoxicated.
Pretty cool idea, except I swear that most of the cab drivers were drunk/stoned/whatever. We were fortunate enough that there was usually someone who would be a designated driver (or, in a pinch, we’d just call a more responsible family member - thanks pops).
I’ve also, on occasion, used the police department (dad was a cop). One of my stomping grounds was right by the police station, and I’d walk in and say “I’m Johnny Law’s son… I really shouldn’t be driving.” This was when I was in college, and I’d often have to sit and wait for a while (like they have something better to do than give the boss’s drunk kid a ride home… crime, schmime).
I’d believe they were just really tired from all the extra work. Driving tired is driving impaired, and it can easily have the same end result as driving drunk or stoned.
Even tiny cities have daiko in Japan-- they’re virtually everywhere. But you raise a good point about a lack of last call. I’ve often wondered why the states doesn’t do daiko, and the best I’ve been able to come up with is that Americans aren’t comfortable with other people touching their cars.
The thing with these outfits is that they’re free. The drivers volunteer. Donations are encouraged, but the program is paid for by sponsors, if I recall correctly. There are at least two people involved, one to drive his own car and one to drive the “client’s” car, and sometimes there’s a third person to ride with the client as a safety measure and/or as a navigator. So even if we’re getting the drunks to pay their own way, it’s hard to imagine that these two (or three) taxi folks will be able to make decent money.
There have been year round driving services in Calgary for years. They leave business cards at bars and have the ads in the Yellow Pages, above urinals.
oddly enough there are many communities in the US that don’t have taxis at all. if I wanted a taxi I would have to find a call out service from a town 15 miles away, and not every taxi company has ‘out of zone’ permits.
They do have this in metro Detroit area. I don’t know anyone who has ever used it, and I think it costs 60or 80 bucks.
I’d imagine it would have the same problem calling a normal taxi on any big night(New years, St. Paddy’s etc.) There isn’t enough demand the rest of the year to keep that many employees, so if you called on one of those nights it would be a 5 hour wait for one to make it there.
Two relevant factors, I think, are population density and DUI laws.
When we lived on Okinawa, we used Diakos all the time. Here, I’d pretty much never consider taking a taxi of any sort to my house, because we’re 30 miles away from any real metropolitan area–I’d guess any taxi ride to our house would cost a minimum of $100 and I don’t even know who I’d call to find one.
But the main thing, I think, is that you cannot drink AT ALL and drive in Japan. The blood alcohol level for DUI is .03 there, and if you get stopped with that, everyone in the car gets a DUI. When we were there, last year, that meant a $10,000 fine for everyone in the car (this actually happened to a group of military guys–one of their buddies, who had not been drinking, went to pick up the group at a bar. He had one beer, and drove them back, got caught they all got DUIs). Here, I’d think nothing of driving after a drink or two, and it wouldn’t be illegal because my BAL would be fine. So, if I’m the designated driver with friends, I can still have a drink, I just can’t get drunk.
Not just the DUI law themselves, but the way they are enforced. In Japan I ran into sobriety checkpoints quite often. They stop every single car and check the driver’s breath for smell of alcohol. I’ve never been checked for DUI in the US.
How much does a daiko taxi ride cost compared with a regular taxi ride between the same end points? The competing model would be a regular taxi ride home and another regular taxi ride in the morning to pick up your car.