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NTSB Recommends Lower Drunk Driving Threshold Nationwide: 0.05 BAC
Officials for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board have recommended a nationwide lowering of the blood-alcohol level considered safe for operating a car. The threshold is currently 0.08% — the NTSB wants to cut that to 0.05%.
"That's about one drink for a woman weighing less than 120 lbs., two for a 160 lb. man. More than 100 countries have adopted the .05 alcohol content standard or lower, according to a report by the board's staff. In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped, the report said. NTSB officials said it wasn't their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner, but they acknowledged that under a threshold as low as .05 the safest thing for people who have only one or two drinks is not to drive at all. ... Alcohol concentration levels as low as .01 have been associated with driving-related performance impairment, and levels as low as .05 have been associated with significantly increased risk of fatal crashes, the board said."
I've always wondered, why not just 0%? Why allow someone to knowingly decrease their ability to drive?
This will save far more lives than any sort of gun regulation ever could.
That's about one drink for a woman weighing less than 120 lbs., two for a 160 lb. man.
[[Insert tired cliche here about finding an American female weighing less than 120lbs or male weighing less than 160lbs]]
that said that driving above 55 was not safe (or economical), the same board that wanted to ban all electronic devices....
yeah! right!.
Driving and booze is like talking about guns. Put away your jerky knees and show me the data.
Look this is not ideal for folks who want to go out and have a large drink with dinner. But on Mythbusters, they've done a number of driving myths at .07999% BAC, and the results are pretty dramatic. You are definitely impaired at .08%.
As a criminal defense attorney, I welcome these changes to the law.
More shakedown-style state revenue collection from law enforcement. 'Nuff Said.
-- Ethanol-fueled
This is incompatible with an infrastructure that is so hostile towards public transportation (outside of some lucky big cities). I live in some backwater suburb in FL and I can't get to a pub to have a couple of drink with a buddy without incurring an extra 20$ in cab fare? In Europe this was easy, you just hop on the bus/U-Bahn/tram and viola. Also in the suburbs.
I have always refused to drink any alcohol (beer, wine, or liquor) whenever I drive. I just do not see the point in adding any risk, particularly because I am not a regular drinker to begin with.
All this will result in is more arrests. The average Joe isn't going to know the difference between .08% and .05%; the only result will be a larger probability in jail time for someone who would otherwise be considered fine to drive today. If we're going to change the numbers in this manner, why not just make it 0% and at least be clear about the message: Drink at all, and you'd better be willing to not drive for a couple of hours.
In Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped, the report said.
I'm reminded of the recent stories on The Daily Show about the more restrictive gun laws in Australia. Yeah, deaths are down, but freedom!
I like to think of it as natural selection sped up. All those firearms and drunk drivers are just thinning the herd. Those folks were just slowing us down. It's the future of the human race. Give it a few more years, we'll be friggin' x-men!
Permissive firearms and drunk driving laws: don't you want to be a super hero?
/ disclaimer: I own firearms and alcohol, though I don't use them at the same time.
How else are they supposed to keep all the police, lawyers, correctional officers and the unions running the criminal justice system employed?!
I saw that episode. They weren't taking the test seriously and were doing exactly what you'd expect horsing around on a closed course making a mockery of the entire scientific process.
I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.
Why not make 0.02% BAC universal? I understand that there are practical limits, but should you really be going out for dinner, downing a bottle, and driving home?
(a 750ml bottle of wine over 2 hours for a 180lb person @ 0.08 = legal)
Have a glass of wine or a beer with dinner. Heck, go ahead and have two. But if you're going to drink any more than that DON'T FUCKING DRIVE A CAR.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
And in the meantime, I have to deal everyday with the asshat having a conversation in the left hand lane, weaving, doing 55mph one minute then 80mph a couple minutes later, then back down 60, then having other cut me off - making me brake hard - because they need to get around him so they can keep their 80mph pace in a 65.
We need self driving cars and humans not allowed to touch the steering wheel.
The majority of accidents are caused by people well over the insipid .08 B.A.C in the first place. B.A.C. isn't a good indication of driving impairment or base levels of intoxication. You can't really measure something arbitrary like drunkeness with a simple blood test. When you can use BAC as an indication of intoxication, it's already too late. Lowering the threshold isn't going to do anything more than increase the amount of people with DUI's, it won't do a damn bit to prevent accidents or make the roads safer. Some people are a danger on the road sober lets focus on them first.
I got here through a series of tubes
Not every city is as great as New York or where the fuck ever these people making the rules are living. There is not always such a thing as public transportation that is worth a shit. Or taxi drivers that are few and far between if they exist at all. Just throw us all in jail right now and get it over with.
Horrible. Drunk driving laws should be based on how a person is driving, not an arbitrary level on a meter that isn't tied to an individuals ability to drive. With video cameras in just about every police car, there is no reason that a little video evidence could be used to demonstrate impaired driving... Switching to a system like this would: bust people incapacitated by other drugs, and bust people who are distracted by devices--- a worse distraction that driving drunk in many cases. (Why is it that if you get in an accident while texting its a slap on the wrist, but if you're driving perfectly well but get stopped at a DUI checkpoint with a .08, its thousands of dollars and a trip to jail?) The DUI laws, while well intentioned, are a huge source of revenue for the criminal "justice" system-- where often, not always, the crime is victimless.
.08% sounds really high to me. .02% is the limit where I live. We have another limit at .1% which can give you up to two years in prison.
...get serious about chasing drink driving regardless of the number.....US traffic stops with any probable cause for DUI need to get scientific, every gets to blow in the bag, non of this walk in a straight line, recite the alphabet backwards nonsense. And above all drink-driving needs to be properly stigmatized socially, I was stunned how many people drank and drive when I moved to the US from Europe, folks regularly drink many times the limit and drove when public transport/taxi is a viable alternative
at some point you are going to have to shut every bar down.
I mean if the limit gets low enough, then no one will ever be able to leave a bar driving. So just outlaw bars.
And then you can install breathalizers and blood toxicollagy tests in the ignition of every car so that you can't drive after a sip of alcohol, listerine, coughsyrup, or hell even a slice of turkey.
I want the government so far up my ass they can tell that I need to brush my teeth.
You mean the same episode where it showed being tired or distracted by cell phones or anything else were actually significantly more impairing than the alcohol?
I don't think we should get rid of drunk driving laws by any stretch of the imagination. However, there are already plenty of distracted/reckless driver laws that exist. I just don't see the a need to create specific laws for every single possible way someone can increase their danger while driving.
Then you should also agree with raising the driving age to 22, and taking away driving privileges of those over 60. Either of these would save many more lives.
So, why dont we put a limit of number of politics, before it gets out of control? For example, 1 politic per 100 millions....and if it does not work, we could increase the limit.
Cars
I mean even without alcohol or cell phones those things are fairly deadly.
Around here the law is still .08 but if you're caught at .05 or above, they will suspend your license for 24 hours but not charge you with DUI. Ignoring the legalities of that, my point in posting is that this has affected my willingness to go out and meet up with friends at a pub... I know I never drank anywhere near what was required to blow .08 and probably never drank anywhere near what is required to blow .05... But now we just never seem to meet up anymore... It's not like a big drunk-fest or anything... We used to just sit around and chat over a pint or two... I would typically switch to a club soda for the last hour or so before going home...
The NTSB won't be satisfied until everyone is off the streets. They keep increasing their power grab by going after the largest cause of death, but once they get that, there will always be another reason for the most number of deaths for them to go after. It never ends with the government increasing their control over us.
Resist this. The dirty secret is that 0.08 is already in the range of normal population variation, especially when age is factored in (i.e., a good fraction of the over-60 population sober are worse drivers than a good fraction of the 20-30 yr old population at 0.08). Lower it and, for example, I don't see how you could rationally also allow anyone over the age of 60 to drive.
Of course, I don't think that there is much rationality in these matters.
We'd prevent many accidents and most of the fatal ones if we forced everyone to drive no faster than 15 miles an hour.
The obvious problem is that it is impractical, likely to severely impact average individuals, and frankly a pretty lousy tradeoff of "freedom" versus safety. I use freedom in quotes, because yes, "driving is a privilege not a right". On a side note, those who make the idiotic argument that the internet should be a "right" because it is almost impossible to live without it are on far more untenable ground than claiming that driving ought to be a "right".
Likewise, with drinking, there are similar practical, freedom versus safety, and impact arguments. I personally fall on the, "the government doesn't give a crap about safety and wants to scam citizens for millions of dollars each year" side of the issue.
There is no excuse for drinking and driving. And, the people with the fewest spare cycles are those most likely to drive impaired. No one has a "right" to endanger others while driving because they are not focused on the task at hand. That includes cell phone conversations, drinking, stuffing their face or whatever they are doing, other than driving.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
they use it over their so it must work fallacy.
If reflexes impairment at .05 is your aim, the you will need to pull a lot of people off the road who don't drink becasue their natural reflexs are slower then that.
If safer roads are you goal. And I would be fine with a reflexes test being a mandatory part of licensing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Problem is it's an arbitrary limit that doesn't scale properly with gender, body size, etc. The limit should be re-evaluated, but not so as to line MADD's or any LEO/municipality's coffers.
Where is this?
this would be fine, if penalties werent increasing every year. it is pretty bad in this midwestern state, where you can lose your license for 10 years for a 3rd offense. and that includes your whole life, not "within the past 10 years" as it is elsewhere, ie if you get in trouble a couple of times as a college kid, you had better not get in trouble even once for the rest of your life, or the state will remove your ability to have any meaningful life (you become a felon, and public transit doesnt exist here)
Are you citing Mythbusters? REALLY?
Good-bye
What portion of accidents, and fatal accidents are _caused_ by alcohol impaired drivers? (I believe they categorize the incident as "alcohol related" if any party has any alcohol in their system).
No question that certain alcohol levels are severely impairing and dangerous, but shouldn't we be punishing all incidents of negligent driving with some level of standardization. If you run a red light, speed excessively (relative to traffic flow), or drive recklessly shouldn't you be subject to the same jail time and lifelong criminal record as someone who gets popped at a checkpoint or busted sleeping in their car while parked? This notion that _only_ drunk drivers cause driving deaths is completely misleading. Maybe if we start putting 17 year old kids in jail for 90 days and taking away their license when they get pulled over for texting, then we'll put all this stuff in perspective.
I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.
Well, I'm certainly glad that we've got the accurate scientific evidence of the assurances of an Anonymous Coward to set us straight!
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
So I am legally drunk? Or is that illegally drunk? Oh, yeah, I wake up in my car every day. Motor running. In case I got to get away. They really are after me. Got no license, neither. My only insurance is by Smith & Wesson. This is why pot needs to be legal. Smack too. Needle exchange at every drugstore. And is it illegal for hookers to do business in Vegas? It is hot there. Cheryl Ladd used to be hotter.
The police are already complaining in America that they can't catch "drunk" drivers at .08. Why? Because at .08 your driving isn't impaired enough to show in your driving. "We need random stops/checkpoints/whatever because we can't catch the people between .08 and .1." Dropping it to .05 is a complete waste of time and just a sop to the cops who want to arrest people (or let them go) on a whim.
making a mockery of the entire scientific process.
On Mythbusters, you say?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
According to my math enforcing a .05 BAC might upset the Inebriati. I'd recommend against it....
No, every single one of there tests have been seriously flawed. IN fact, anything involving driving on the show borders on surprisingly stupid.
That's not even getting into the issue that the issue is reflexes and response time, so you should test reflexes and response time, not how much of X is in your system.
Of course, that would be reasonable, and remove most people over 60 from driving.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It will certainly make designated drivers even more popular.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*. If we *all* needed to go re-test for driving every 5 years (for example), there'd be a huge reduction in the number of accidents over-all, and people would be more likely to keep abreast of changes to the laws and safety standards.
As for raising the driving age to 22? I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14. That way you have a chance to learn to drink in a supervised setting with adults who (theoretically) know how to drink safely, and you have a chance to get all the stupid "hey guys, check this out!" stories out of your system before you're ever allowed near the wheel of a car.
I'm the AC that wrote that. Drive over 0.08 all the time. I've never had a problem. The penalties of being pulled over and breathalyzed are quite enough incentive to pay fucking attention.
When I'm driving sober (too/from work, during business hours), I will allow myself to be distracted by cell phones, hot girls on the sidewalks, billboards, shit like that.
When I've had a few beers or whatever, you can bet your ass I'm driving straight and center down that fucking lane, radio off, cell phone off, eyes on that road. Because one little swerve from switching the radio station could get me pulled over. A non-event if I haven't been drinking, but a very bad situation if I've had a few beers.
This is how most drunk driving takes place. The wrecks and deaths on the road are outliers. A very small percentage of drunk drivers have incidents. I've driven "drunk" well over 1000 times and have had no incidents. Problem is, you won't find any official data to back that up.
You know what would really make our roads safe? If we had a way to measure and issue citations for following distance. All other problems, speeding, cornering too fast, switching lanes without blinkers, intoxication, blah blah all come down to that you could injure someone else while performing a driving maneuver.
.05? Revenue stream. Don't stand for this crap.
Lets say all cars had a system that prevented you from driving within 100 yards of other cars. It wouldn't matter if the car in front/behind of you was intoxicated, speeding, stopping, swerving or all the above, you could just AVOID them and the only person injured would be the violator. Such a device is impractical/impossible, but beating it into people that they need to leaving space between cars might make a small difference.
Oh and
Certainly, like most things, there is a limit to the value of the regulation. We know that hands free cell phone usage is still dangerous while driving but we don't outlaw it because using a cell phone while driving is too valuable. What about drinking and driving? Yes, 0.01% can still affect driving, but regulating to that level just isn't worth the burden it puts on people. So where is the cutoff? Is 0.05% already too low, just right, or not low enough?
This MADD crusade really has to end. This is not going to "save lives" and instead is going to be a revenue source for the government and a life wrecker for those stopped. From Reason.com:
Then you should also agree with raising the driving age to 22, and taking away driving privileges of those over 60. Either of these would save many more lives.
Perhaps you have some evidence or calculations to back up that assertion?
"2. Functioning poorly or incompetently: " . Isn't that the purpose behind the dozens of laws that cover driving that fit that definition? That covers it all, phones, cats, kids, friends, drugs, alcohol, etc. etc. If you want modifiers for especially egregious behavior like drinking then so be it but these stupid arbitrary numbers definitely seem to almost beg for people to "use responsibly" when the law pretty much defines it as "not at all". Ohh, I know that would require actually seeking out impaired drivers instead of randomly making examples of people regardless of their actual ability.
I'm such a cheap drunk that I voluntarily observe a limit of zero when I'm driving. I remember one night when I was tired and hungry and managed to get completely blasted on one can of american beer. :-)
For flying the limit is zero as well, with the requirement of eight hours from the last drink to takeoff.
The real solution is social: make it utterly unfashionable to drink and drive.
...laura
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is that American beer or Canadian beer :) They must mean a pint of beer cause I weight 160lbs and had 4 beer cans and only measured .03 when I went through a ride check. In Ontario they can suspend your license for 3 days if you are between .05 and .08. You got to be off your rocker to have a BAC of .08 ... .05 on a pitch black road is bad enough.
You must live somewhere with public transit if you think that raising the driving age to 21 is even feasible.
> Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*.
Don't be silly, driving isn't based on skill. That's why there's a minimum driving age and a maximum speed and maximum BAC. We don't test those things, they're one size fits all. No driving after 60 is as entirely reasonable as no driving before your proposed 21, or even the 16-18 we currently have. After all, there are those of us that had more care and responsibility when we were just old enough to reach the petals than many have at the ripe age of 21.
Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*. If we *all* needed to go re-test for driving every 5 years (for example), there'd be a huge reduction in the number of accidents over-all, and people would be more likely to keep abreast of changes to the laws and safety standards.
Taking it a step further, if we didn't hand out licenses to kill to every 16 year old who passes a rudimentary exam, there'd be yet another huge reduction in accident rates.
Not to say that 16-year-olds shouldn't be allowed to drive, but rather there should be far more mandatory training involved.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
There are other things that probably need to go along with or instead of just lowering the limit.
Some options are:
1) requiring bars to offer free breathalizers with printouts to customers.
2) requiring bars to test patrons and issuing notes/warnings.
3) requiring bars to test patrons and not return keys/license if over limit (maybe still allow the DD to retrieve it for them)
4) requiring bars to offer free transportation home if customer is over the limit.
5) making bars jointly liable so that they have a big incentive to implement their own solutions.
etc...
They average person is stupid and doesn't know their limit, it would be easier to be more proactive on the bar side.
.08 or .05 is entirely irrelevant. If people don't actually get punished for driving under influence or causing accidents and killing people like that, they'll only bitch louder and the ones that will start drinking less will be those watching their pockets.
Leave it at 0.08 but triple or at least double the penalties, and things will change a lot more than that extra .03 would.
Typically this sort of reduction will be accompanied by a public awareness campaign on the dangers of drink driving. I'm not totally convinced this is a good argument.
I'm the AC that wrote that. Drive over 0.08 all the time. I've never had a problem.
You're not statistically significant.
Changing from 0.15 to 0.08 was an obvious improvement. At 0.15 you're not just drunk you're plastered and definitely shouldn't be behind the wheel. The move from 0.08 to 0.05 though is much less straightforward. Zero tolerance is not an appropriate answer to all questions.
It will certainly make designated drivers even more popular.
Time to monetize that shit!
http://www.substitutedrivers.com/home.htm
No, I don't work for them, just think it's a bitchin' idea!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
do 10 seconds of research yourself you lazy bastard.
Teen drivers, though often not killing other people, are the most likely to be involved in fatal accidents. The newspapers in my area, for every 1 drunk driving related death, there's at least 10 teen related deaths.
Google tells me he's from Sweden:
Sweden: 0.02% (up to 6 months imprisonment), 0.10% (imprisonment, maximum 2 years), zero (if not driving safely.)
However, there are already plenty of distracted/reckless driver laws that exist. I just don't see the a need to create specific laws for every single possible way someone can increase their danger while driving.
Exactly. Start putting people in jail for texting or talking on their cellphone while driving. Make them felons if they do it 3 times during their lifetime (gotta love laws arbitrarily based on sports). People need to take operating a big dangerous and deadly machine seriously, and making "drunk drivers" the martyr isn't going to help us. Properly educated drivers and investment in improving the conditions of our roads will save a lot more lives than ruining a few unlucky peoples'
I know my view is not very popular, but in 90% of all accidents with injuiries the main cause is that at least one party involved was driving too fast.
For any road/personal conditions you should choose your speed, so that you can stop before you hit something. It's really that simple.
Dark, you can see less => drive slower, so you can stop in your view. ...) => drive slower so you can stop if something out of the hidden field of view appears.
Wet, icy road => drive slower, so you can stop because your stopping distance increases.
Drunken => drive slower, so you can compensate for the increased reaction times.
Field of view obstructed with objects (parked cars, corners, trees, intersections,
The main cause why drunk drivers cause a lot of serious accidents is not because they have an increased reaction time, but because they overestimate themselfes and drive waaay to fast for their condition.
But it's simpler to punish people based on some simple, but not so relevant, metrics like constant speed limits and intoxication levels.
I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.
Assure me by citing evidence supporting your case.
peer reviewed studies >>> mythbusters > AC's personal testimony.
I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.
I've personally been rear ended by a driver on a real road where people are more alert after consuming a few drinks who blew 0.07. He was definitely impaired. Not stumbling and slurring, but his reactions were off, and he drove straight into the back of a nearly stopped car at 50km/h without hitting the brakes. I was decelerating and pulling to the left side of the lane to make a left turn on a single lane road, and was nearly stopped at the time of impact; we got knocked into the oncoming lane and had a low speed head on collision as well (the oncoming guy at least hit his brakes).
He was convicted of DUI. The limit here is 0.05.
HELL
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Driving dangerously should be the issue, period. We shouldn't need to make five thousand laws for five thousand contexts. If you are reckless and dangerous on the road because of texting, talking on the phone, parenting your children in the back seat, watching videos on your laptop in the passenger seat, or just sheer stupidity or old age -- it should all fall under the same category and impact your license to drive.
The only reason a few items might sensibly be specifically classified and identified is because of the intentional choices that go into them. For example, nobody accidentally drinks and drives or accidentally texts while driving.
Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*. If we *all* needed to go re-test for driving every 5 years (for example), there'd be a huge reduction in the number of accidents over-all, and people would be more likely to keep abreast of changes to the laws and safety standards.
Here's the problem. Retesting costs money. Lowing the DWI limit brings in money. Those are highly profitable. This isn't about safety. It's about taxing unpopular people.
That show is maybe one step ahead of your mom saying "just one puff of pot could be your last" when it comes to issues like that. And their "science" is maybe one step above your mom saying "because I told you so".
Pretty much all traffic enforcement these days is about revenue.
This^^^ - if they lower the bar for intoxicated driving. more money can be made on fines.
Right, because if it is not peer reviewed and published by Elsevier then it's completely garbage. There are no degrees in between. Either it's the "truth" (TM) or it has absolutely no scientific evidentiary value.
Glad you understand so well how data collection works.
Base your license on actual performance metrics that matter. In Virginia, I had to take a peripheral vision test to get my license when I was younger.
I never had to take that test anyplace else. What if we took that concept and extended it to the wide variety of skills that directly translate to driving ability: actual perception of events in mirrors, reaction to those events, etc. We could do it with simulators or something.
Now here's the revolutionary part. We've all known people that claim they can drive with a bottle of JD in one hand and a joint in the other while texting with the phone between their knees. Let 'em try it in the simulator. If they pass the test, give 'em a permit to drive with a higher limit.
The problem with this is that we'd also see a lot of seniors who are worse sober behind the wheel than young people with a few beers in 'em. We'd see 20-somethings that could never get a license because they are truly stupid drivers. We'd see a class of people that were allowed to do things that are currently not permitted; but the real outrage would come from all the intrinsically dangerous people we'd have to take off the road.
That's why it's an interesting idea; but it won't happen.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You show up at the test, the test proctor gives you an appropriate amount of alcohol, you drink it, then take a breathalyzer to prove you are properly sauced.
Then you take the normal driving test. If you pass you get to drive with x amount of alcohol in your system.
Of course this will never happen because the issue was never about "safety" it is about punishing poor people.
Doesn't everybody? My god, next time, you'll be complaining about how it's impossible to get high speed internet in your village.
but, alas, i have no mod points. Ain't it just always that way.
a six pack - try it some time!
Public transportation is shit in this country. It works, sure. It's overpriced, though, because every RTA is very top-heavy and poorly managed. It's also dirty (unless you live in DC), littered with homeless people (regardless of how you look at it, it makes me uncomfortable when I get asked for multiple times on the way to work, and homeless people frequently aren't travelling, they're just looking to crash), crowded (lack of personal space is undesirable, although it could easily be fixed by making trains longer like they were in the 70s), and.. yeah. I thought I had more, but if public transportation wasn't the retarded godchild of poorly managed state-federal ventures, maybe more people would use it.
From the CNN variation of TFA: "From a "At 0.01 BAC, drivers in simulators demonstrate attention problems and lane deviations. At 0.02, they exhibit drowsiness, and at 0.04, vigilance problems."
Ha! I witness these issues repeatedly on a daily basis from plenty of people with zero alcohol in their system (ok, I didn't test them, but I think we can safely assume >99% of drivers had not been drinking at 8-9am for example). Let's face it, some people just suck at driving, and that makes them quite dangerous already before you even factor in alcohol. I've even experienced some of these symptoms myself on occasion w/o drinking -- especially drowsiness.
I'm all for very low tolerance of drinking and driving, but I wish the media/politicians/etc. would stop making it out to be the only problem with driving, or that it is the biggest cause of accidents and/or deaths. On some "top N causes" lists it's even down at #5 or so. What usually tops alcohol is various forms of distractions (rubbernecking, eating, fiddling with radio, etc.), and what leads that list is usually cell phone usage. Studies have been done which shown that even talking on the phone is just as dangerous (albeit in slightly different ways) as being at the current legal BAC limit. So lowering legal BAC limits will actually make talking on the phone "even worse" than DWI.
For those who are screaming "citation needed!" in their heads right now, here's one of many I quickly googled up. Plenty more out there, just go look. And that is just talking on the phone...texting and/or surfing the web is even worse, and becoming more prevalent.
I think it's time to put more of this attention & funding against cell phone usage (not to say ignore alcohol, but share the spotlight so to speak). Better driver education & more so driver training (as in actual training, like car control & stuff) would also help overall safety considerably.
I could go for this, if you could get it to be actually enforced. Selective enforcement ("i think drunk drivers are bad, so i'll bust them, but texting, hey, everyone does that, it can't be bad") is a problem. Fill in your own law-enforcement preferred and hated activities. Not only do you have to get police to agree to actually enforce per measured-risk, you have to get cranky old judges who liked things the way they were back then to all be on the same page.
Anyone who decides to drink, with the intent of driving later is guilty of attempted murder if they get behind the wheel after that first drink.
Here's how it should be.
Cost of the first drink, anywhere - cost of drink + your car keys.
You get them back the next day, when you haven't had alcohol for at least 12 hours, and your blood alcohol level is 0.0%.
First offense, drinking while intoxicated, blood alcohol level above 0.0 (including 0.001%) - permanent driver's license suspension. You can never get it back.
First offense, your car (if it is your own) is crushed into a cube, and planted in your yard for everyone to see.
Second offense, death penalty, because obviously, you want to kill someone - let it be yourself.
Then we might get rid of the idiots of the world.
Life is what you make of it - don't fuck it up by drinking (or self-medicating) and driving.
We all know how well that worked out the last time.
The accident numbers represented as being caused by alcohol are massively overstated. If someone who has a detectable amount of alcohol in their system is rear ended at a stop light, that is counted, even though the person who struck them was completely sober.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It will make proving 0.10 and 0.08 drunk driving cases a LOT easier.
This is ridiculous.
It's like calling having one drink per hour for 4 hours "binge drinking" even tho a person my size (262 lb) wouldn't even be blowing .02 unless I slammed the drink.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Are you also willing to require that people only drive when they are well rested? Turns out being sleepy is a major impairment to driving. So are we going to restrict that as well? After there is "no excuse".
It's about as feasible as lowering the BAC to .05% and would probably save more lives.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Which explains why americans are so socially inept and so fat, and so selfish. Well done mister, don't stop, put a fence around your house and kidnap another 14 year old teenage.
That gets today's prize for most ridiculously over-the-top hate-and-assumption-filled response.
1) Social skills are learned in pubs, bars and the like, while drinking alcohol.
2) Staying out of bars, pubs, etc, will make you fat.
3) Failure to drink enough and be in the company of others while doing so will result in selfishness.
4) Americans are particularly vulnerable due to their lack of drinking.
5) People that disagree with you are child molesters. or is it "people that don't drink"? or "people with fences around their house"? you should clarify this point for us.
Since driving does involve a huge set of skills that cannot be fully learned without practice, raising the driving age will only have the effect of pushing the high accident rate group to still be the first age group allowed to drive. Anyone who wants to quote some statistics showing how Europeans in the 18-21 years group have lower accident rates than the US 16-18, has to show that they have successfully not included anyone in the European group who had their scooter license at 14 and their small engine ( 500 cc) motorcycle at 16. Most of Europe is letting kids learn to negotiate traffic at a younger age than in the US but most Americans don't realize that.
I actually RTFA'ed (both articles). All they say is crap like "in Europe, the share of traffic deaths attributable to drunken driving was reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard was dropped". That's a sound bite, not a statistic from a study. What other variables were controlled for? Changing age distribution and other demographics of drivers? Stricter DWI enforcement (aside from the lower limit)? Changing hours in bars? There are endless possibilities. Moreover, what are the penalties imposed for 0.05% and higher thresholds? I know there is a 100 page NTSB report I could read, but I'd hope that a newspaper article could give at least a halfway intelligent summary.
That's a touchy subject. Seems like I see an article on /. about how "fiber is coming to rural VT" at least once every couple months. Well heck if I've ever met someone who has it, outside of the FiOS service in Burlington (which definitely isn't "rural VT").
Drunks Against Mad Mothers, I approve this!
how will the 16-year-olds get to the pub if they can't drive??
It's all but a money-making scheme, just like speed cameras.
Then you should also agree with raising the driving age to 22, and taking away driving privileges of those over 60. Either of these would save many more lives.
No, if we raise the driving age to 22, then 22 year old drivers would be the new most dangerous drivers. What we need to do is not let anyone drive until they've been driving for 5 years. Paradox be damned.
Driving over 60? If they can demonstrate that they are attentive, do not disrupt the flow of traffic, are not losing their sight or hearing, can obey speed limits and traffic signals, stay in their lane, use turn signals, etc, then let them drive.
Heck, I would even let people go for a "can drive drunk" endorsement on their license. Of course, 99.9% of applicants would end up killing themselves in the testing environment I envision, but the others should be safe to drive while intoxicated.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
All the training in the world isn't going to stop some stupid 16-year-olds out to impress their girlfriends from tailgating you in the fast lane because you aren't driving their desired 88.7 mph.
So you are saying in Europe young people are only allowed to drive scooters/small motorcycles which rarely kill anyone except possibly the driver, and that means that when they get their car driving license they are less likely to kill someone in their first years of driving? How is that an argument AGAINST doing it like Europe?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
During WWI, you were convicted of sedition if you criticized the US's entry into the war. Apparently that is OK, because it was the law.
0.05 is unreasonable. It is de facto prohibition, and unconstitutional.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You mean the same episode where it showed being tired or distracted by cell phones or anything else were actually significantly more impairing than the alcohol?
I don't think we should get rid of drunk driving laws by any stretch of the imagination. However, there are already plenty of distracted/reckless driver laws that exist. I just don't see the a need to create specific laws for every single possible way someone can increase their danger while driving.
I agree cell phones or even conversations are a problem but there's a big difference in that I can hang up when I encounter a potentially dangerous situation, I don't have that option if I'm drunk.
I stole this Sig
NTSB officials said it wasn't their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner, but ...
Could they be more disingenuous?
Next thing they'll tell us that red-light cameras are strictly for safety.
Let's be honest. -most- of the drivers on the road just below and above the legal limit make it home safely. Are they taking a huge risk? Yes, but it mostly pays off. Except when it doesn't pay off, it's so needlessly tragic. So let's set some realistic penalties so it no longer pays to take the risk.
DUI and loss of life - automatic death penalty or life in prison without parole.
DUI and injury - 20 years minimum in prison
DUI and property damage only - 5 years minimum in prison
DUI and no injuries, death or property damage - heavy fine based on income; 2nd time loss of license forever and fines; driving with DUI-revoked license 5 years minimum in prison and fines; 3rd DUI 20 years minimum in prison
Most sensible people will readily comply with the law. Those that don't have a clue will be sent away quickly.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
One can already be arrested for having less than a .08% BAC in Georgia, and many other states. I'm not sure about the statue on other states, but in Georgia, according to the O.C.G.A.(Official Code of Georgia Annotated), one is considered "less safe" if law enforcement can provide proof that the driver was "under the influence" at a level below the "legal limit". I have arrested many people under this portion of the DUI statue, in Georgia.
Usually, I would establish "less safe" with video and audio recordings of the driver's inability to maintain lane and other moving violations, as well as my encounter with the driver, and the sobriety tests administered during the stop of the particular individual. "Less safe" is important, as it removes bureaucratic roadblocks from stop those that aren't capable of possessing a certain amount of alcohol in their bloodstream and operating a motor vehicle. The NTSB is doing nothing that isn't already enforced in many, possible most or all states currently.
There are people that can safely drive with 0.08% BAC, and higher. While I personally don't consume alcohol, I do consume narcotics for severe pain relief. If one took my blood and observed the levels, they would probably wish to jail me on those numbers alone. The issue is that it's safe to allow me to operate a motor vehicle, as I'm not "under the influence"(I don't experience the negative effects of narcotics, and even have a high tolerance against some of the positive effects), or my state of alertness and readiness isn't impacted in the slightest. That is what the people should be concerned with, whether the driver is "under the influence", "less safe", or simply whether the individual isn't capable of safely operating a motor vehicle.
Considering my past experience as a seventeen-year-old, I was a bad driver because I acted like a seventeen-year-old, not because I was new to driving.
...where they have sane laws, the very first definition of driving under the influence is:
"1. While under the influence of intoxicating liquor, any drug, a vapor releasing substance containing a toxic substance or any combination of liquor, drugs or vapor releasing substances if the person is impaired to the slightest degree."
.08 is also specifically referenced later, and there are provisions aggravated and extreme DUI as well.
It does make it a bitch that you have to know that when a cop asks you, "Do you feel impaired at all?" that answering "yes" means you've just bought a DUI ticket with your mouth.
But aside from stupidities arising from stupid drivers not knowing the law, I always thought this made very much sense. Let the police present their case as to why they felt you were impaired, what BAC reading you had, and let the court decide if you were impaired. Bonus points for dash cams documenting the officer's testimony.
Doesn't matter. The statistics on drunk driving accidents aren't a valid indicator of the effects of drunk driving. You're missing a large sample of data that includes drunk drivers that don't have accidents and don't kill people. The notion that lowering the legal BAC level will reduce deaths on the road is not supported by any data.
It WILL increase the number of DUI convictions and increase state revenues and the bank accounts of the lawyers.
Getting a DUI here can be as easy as a cop saying you are impaired. No BAC required. If you are sleeping on a park bench drunk with car keys in your pocket you can be charged with a DUI because you had the ability to drive. I'm not condoning drinking and driving at all let me make that clear. But here it's a money grab. It's all mandatory fines and sentences, a lawyer is fairly useless. Never been in trouble in your life? Well get a DUI here and you'll be spending 30 days in jail (which you have to pay the state $65 per day), get a alcohol blower in your car for a year at $100 a month, go to months of alcohol classes at $100 a month, pay a lot of fines (in total around $7500). Lower the level to 0.05% and.....profit!
That's nothing! Did you see the episode where they compared it to being tired!
With the current social norm seeming to be, that not sleeping is somehow "cool" (instead of moronic), and drinking loads of coffee to stay awake as long as possible. one must assume that the majority of people are constantly overtired and not fit to drive a car.
Compared to that, things like 0.08% BAC are almost not even noteworthy!
Why the hell we're testing for BAC instead of the actual ability to react to reflexes and make good decisions is still beyond me...
...is that there's not much sense of proportionality. When we here of a driver who was measured at .21 most of us think that's a much worse hazard than a .08, yet it's usually treated the same. A new standard of .05? Ok, but leave .08 and penalties where they are and have a lesser charge, DWPI (P=possibly), and lesser penalty for those between .05 and .08.
Then sell me a car that can safely drive me home.
do 10 seconds of research yourself
Good point. It's utterly unreasonable to expect someone making an assertion to know any facts that back that assertion. BTW, have you considered running for congress?
The newspapers in my area, for every 1 drunk driving related death, there's at least 10 teen related deaths.
I'd respond, but I'm afraid the only grammar I know is English.
If say 30% of accident are caused by drunks ...70% are caused by sober people...thus sober are more dangerous than drunks
thus having everybody drunk will reduce accident rate right ?
Just joking though ..it is no joke for those who have lost people in drunk driving accidents.
Before lowering the standard how about seriously enforcing what we have. It seems like when I read about a car into a house, through a storefront or killing a kid the story also mentions how many prior arrests and convictions the person has.
The local papers have run several articles about people having their licenses suspended or revoked and then walking out of court, hopping in their cars and driving away.
I occasionally listen to the police scanner and an astonishing number of people they pull over and run come back "suspended or revoked" yet I almost never hear that followed by "send the tow truck."
Moving the numbers around is meaningless if someone is driving with 10 prior convictions.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
You really can't completely trust any episode of the Mythbusters where they test the myth on themselves instead of on volunteers because their expectations come into play. They could easily be subject to a placebo effect and because they believe they will perform better or worse, they do. Also, when they perform tests like this, they generally have a sample size of three, which isn't exactly statistically significant.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
For the boys, hitch a ride with your older siblings; threaten to rat them out to mom and dad if they get shitty about it.
For the girls... well, I suppose the same way 16-year-old girls have always gotten into the pubs... fake IDs and waaaaay too much makeup.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
At %0.05 the vast majority of violators--people who had two glasses of wine at dinner--will go unpunished. Those caught after a dinner will rightly feel unfairly singled out. If we drop it to %0.05 the punishment should be nominal. For example, anything between %0.05 and %0.08 is always just a ticket with small fine, without a branding as a "drunk driver". That way there's an overall legal pressure to drink less, without the unjust individualized stigma.
I heard this news and decided it was time to buy a personal breathalyzer for $25 from Amazon.com. I've driven home after a full pitcher of beer and dinner without any issues. Granted, I'm closer to 300 pounds; so my tolerance is a bit higher than most. But, it doesn't cost much to be able to check your BAC on the go and just walk around for 30 minutes or so while your body metabolizes whatever it needs to get you down to a safer level.
Remove the reference to age and I'll completely agree with you. I don't think it matters much if it is a 16 y/o boy or a 60 y/o lady, if they just got their license, they have little to no experience. The one will be a little more reckless but learn faster. I think the license thing should start earlier, say at 14 y/o....
"Experience" starts at zero and increments +1 every "incident free year", maxing at 10
experience: 1 - written test, can drive with experienced (5+ years) driver in the vehicle
experience: 2 - behind the wheel, can drive with experienced (5+ years) driver or alone(no night driving, no interstates, not faster than 55, no passengers)
experience: 3 - full driving privileges
experience: 5 - can supervise the above, can pursue commercial licenses (bus, trucking, etc.)
Any accidents/points and you get "experience deducted" for 6 months...including going negative. If your "experience" rating is ever below 5 you have to take written test and get a new license every year. Fall below 2 and you get to retake the behind the wheel.
If 0.05 being approx 2 drinks for a 160lb man is the new legal limit then we're all sort of like Raj and Sheldon who get crazy after the 2nd sip.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
_He_ isn't, but people like him are, unfortunately. It's people like him that cause accidents.
Just because someone doesn't think they're impaired doesn't mean they aren't. Most people have driven drunk, and most people believe that they're still excellent drivers when "buzzed". Just like everybody believes they're better drivers than everybody else, and above average in general.
This is what I have to explain to my wife when she gets road rage. On a long drive you may drive alongside several hundred to several thousand cars. Of those, only 1 or 2 will really piss you off, and in all probability those "bad" drivers accidentally or unwittingly committed an error... errors we all unwittingly commit at a low, regular rate. We rarely realize the majority of our own driving errors (take the ones you do realize and multiply it by some integer), but when someone does it to us it really stands out.
People are really bad at statistical thinking, even those who are good at solving actual equations.
The reason why they recommend lower and lower alcohol contents has more to do with the way they collect statistics than with any real effect.
If any of the drivers involved in an accident has any alcohol blood content at all, it is recorded as an "alcohol related accident", NO MATTER WHO CAUSED THE ACCIDENT.
This is bias in the worst sense of the word, it's political propaganda at its worst.
Suppose you drank one beer and is stopped at a red light. Then a madd bitch rear ends you. It will be an "alcohol related" accident, pointing to the "need for stricter drunken driving laws", even though the madd bitch caused it.
Eventually your luck will run out, even if not necessarily because of being caught (we'll get back to that), but because you'll cause an accident. When the road situation is relaxed, you are safe. As soon as things get tight or there's something unexpected, your performance is impaired, and it's simple objective measures such as reaction times and visual acuity we're talking about.
Now, nystagmus leads to loss of visual acuity at higher spatial frequencies while, perhaps counterintuitively, boosting the contrast at lower spatial frequencies.
This means that if you get motion-induced nystagmus, as you're likely to at 0.08% BAC and up, you won't be able to read the fucking speedometer or even roadside signs, and your brain will be substituting expected values for actual ones. That's how some drunk drivers are getting caught, and they swear they were not speeding. That's how some military and aerobatic pilots end up with doing controlled flights into terrain in instrument conditions - they don't see the artificial horizon without realizing it.
What you may also find scary is that people's susceptibility to various ototoxins (substances that impair the vestibular system) can vary a lot, and alcohol is not the only ototoxin out there. You can get same problems simply by being exposed to organic solvents.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Associations should not be used to determine whether or not someone goes to jail.
I know that objective tests are a sticky situation for law enforcement, but punishing people with different physiologies is silly. Impaired is impaired. x%BAC != impairment.
During WWI, you were convicted of sedition if you criticized the US's entry into the war. Apparently that is OK, because it was the law.
The difference here is that there is genuine science measuring the result. 0.08 is pretty dramatically impaired and has a marked effect on reaction times. 0.07999 is not at all "safe".
0.05 is unreasonable. It is de facto prohibition, and unconstitutional.
Prohibition? You are prohibited from drinking and then operating a two ton machine on our public road network. Boo fucking hoo.
Drink your brains out and get a buddy to drive you. Prohibition my ass.
Erm, no one has a right to drive let alone to have a certain amount of alcohol while driving.
Driving is a privilege earned by proving you have significant competence in controlling a two ton missile. It is a privilege revoked once proof exists to justify that you don't have that competence anymore. Adding an additional condition indicative of a lack of competence behind a roadgoing vehicle (regardless of how arbitrary one might think it seems) is within the bounds of the law because driving itself is a privilege.
Sorry to burst your utopian bubble there.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
It's hard not to sound like a troll when talking about this. Just don't drive drunk. I don't care if it's inconvenient for you. I don't care if cabs are expensive. I don't care if you can handle your alcohol well. I support very strong DUI laws. It just seems like you're playing russian roulette with other peoples' lives. Driving drunk is such an obviously stupid thing to do that I question anybody sense who argues for leniency regarding drunk driving.
>There are people that can safely drive with 0.08% BAC, and higher.
.08, .08 is pretty drunk.
They are called alcoholics.
I like to drink and I have tested myself at
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
0.00 is unreasonable (you're hitting endogenous alcohol background). 0.01 is prohibition level. 0.05 is already close to the upper scale of reasonableness.
I bet you complain about big government, too.
Seriously, you want to test reflexes and response time? When? After someone is pulled over when they're good and wound up from dealing with the police? After an accident when they're messed up? How's that going to work? How about they want to know, in advance, if they're safe to drive? Are you going to have frequent tests for this? Are people going to get calibrated?
There's a reason why they create laws that are fairly simple, but not excruciatingly precise. Because it's a balance between a massive bureaucracy and doing nothing.
The average women in America is 156 pounds, the average man 196. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/26/ideal-weight-americans-weigh-pounds_n_2193385.html
Are there any women left in America under 120lbs? Or men under 160lbs?
Drink limit charts and such that top out before you even reach the lowest rung of real Americans only confuse people. How many drinks can the average 156lbs women have before reaching 0.05%? And the average 196lbs man? What about the above average (and sadly very, very common) 200+lbs women, 300lbs man? Do you double the recommendations...or do you see that 1 drink is the difference between 120 and 160...so "logically" it's 1 more drink for each 40lbs above the 120lbs floor... So a 300lbs man should be able to drink...5 or 6? A 200 lbs woman should be able to handle 3?
Never mind that what passes for "1 drink" is like the "1 serving" on nutritional info. A typically real drink is easily equivalent to 2-3 "recommended" drinks.
Add the mythical weight specs to the mythical drink sizes and it's little wonder why people are stumbling out of bars thinking they can drive. We told them they could!
My
You cannot get any more scientific than testing theories in REAL LIFE. You trust hot air (thoughts and words) from "experts" with a Ph.D. title more? To do science you do NOT have to belong to the church of science (priest = Ph.D). It CAN be done by the layman at home. All you need is curiosity and common sense.
It's not "prohibition", people can drink all they want, they just don't have the right to get behind the wheel and potentially kill someone.
You're not very good at this trolling game.
There's a number of different ways to 'toughen' drunk driving laws, and lowering the BAC level is only one of them.
1. Lower the BAC level - problem: Even .08 is low enough that a cop driving behind you can't tell whether you're inebriated or just tired, on allergy medication, old, new to driving or just a bad driver.
2. Impose confinement: Something like 30 days in jail for the first offense. Problem: High impact; you're normally putting an employed person in jail, which means they might lose their job, at which point you have to provide for the care of them and their family(or they're not paying taxes).
3. Impose fines: Already done; to the point that poor people can't afford them yet the really rich often don't care
4. Force them to have an interlock device: The difficulty in fooling the thing is limited to the expense of simply evading it by getting a different vehicle.
5. Expand the definition of 'DUI' - I've heard of people busted for DUI while sleeping in the backseat of their car in the bar parking lot. Their own driveway I can sort of understand, and parked on the side of the road nowhere near where alcohol is served is downright suspicious, but if the engine isn't hot... I've also heard of people getting DUIs on riding lawnmowers, though most of those are justified in my opinion. Once you get on a motorway with your John Deere you're subject to the rules of the road... The funniest, I think, are the ones where somebody got a DUI while riding a horse or bicycle.
Especially for #5, you start to have to question whether the law in question is actually 'for the common good'. If the law is intended to protect the drunk against his own actions, what sense does it make to force him to suffer more serious losses than he realistically would even in an accident?
Eliminating drunk driving is a complex affair, and I think we need to do more to reduce the heavy drinkers from driving drunk - not expand the definition again.
I don't read AC A human right
We should just limit driving rights to those folks who don't drink, don't use cell phones while driving, only drive to and from work, and are unwilling to go above the speed limit. The problem is, the Amish prefer horse and buggy.
Seriously though, this is pretty absurd. Dropping the BAC limit from .08 to .05 is not going to ruin more lives than it saves. As numerous other posters have said, the statistics provided in TFA are totally cherry-picked. They do not account for many other variables that changed over the same time frame. Additionally, as many have stated, the US does not have the mass transit infrastructure to provide reasonably priced alternative transportation means. This is effectively criminalization of alcohol, as most people would be unable to consume more than 1 drink while engaging in social activity if they have to rely on their own transportation. If you are tipsy after one drink, then you probably should not be drinking in general.
In college, we ran an experiment to assess the affect of alcohol on our bodies. There were about 20 of us, and one of our friends had a go-cart and a dirt track on his property. We setup a pretty elaborate obstacle course in the back and made people go through it as quickly as possible after varying numbers of drinks and measuring their BAC. What we found in this very non-scientific study was that, aside from those who weighed less than about 115, it took roughly 4 drinks in under an hour for any noticeable difference in performance on the track. In all but one of those cases, the only difference was the speed at which they finished the course. The average BAC was .09%, and the only person who had an "accident" just knocked over a single cone when slaloming. We didn't see people get really sloppy until around .12-.14% in our tests.
Now, your mileage may vary, and driving a go-kart off road is certainly very different than driving on a real road. That said, I can tell you with near certainty that when my BAC is at .08% my coordination and reflexes have hardly changed. At .05% I suspect I would not feel anything, except a lot of financial pain and humiliation at being given a DUI for having 2 beers. This recommendation is absurd, and frankly when my government says it wants to be more like Europe, I'm always a bit wary.
That should've said.... "Seriously though, this is pretty absurd. Dropping the BAC limit from .08 to .04 is going to to ruin more lives than it saves."
It will be interesting to see how much support (if any) this gets in Congress. Study and study has shown that ANY level of impairment negatively effects your ability to operate a motor vehicle. Impairment from not only alcohol but also cellphone distraction (calling and especially texting or facebooking). We already have laws on the books regarding alcohol impairment but very little with respect to cellphones. Why? The telecoms will fight tooth and nail any attempt to reduce the amount of time that people spend on cellphones because it theoretically takes money out of their pockets. Public safety be damned.
I realize that I'm a statistical outlier on this one but I actually play better in competitive settings while slightly drunk. There is a weird sweet spot somewhere in the .10x area for me that I have better reaction times and judgement than if I was slightly buzzed, sober, or completely drunk. My clan mates can attest to this, as I do better in tournaments in this area than if I were sober. They actually tell me to hit a few beers before we get into matches.
I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.
Assure me by citing evidence supporting your case.
In the 1950's and 60's, before any serious drink-driving laws, all those bar-propping, Harris-Tweed jacket wearing, pink-gin drinking, pipe-smoking, Jaguar driving, David-Niven-moustache wearing, ex-Army major types said it. What more evidence do you want ?
"Look this is not ideal for folks who want to go out and have a large drink with dinner. But on Mythbusters, they've done a number of driving myths at .07999% BAC, and the results are pretty dramatic. You are definitely impaired at .08%."
BULLSHIT!!!
Not that Mythbusters didn't do that, but Mythbusters is a TV show. They don't have either the money or time to do a real study on this.
This is not about safety. It is about control.
Some years ago, the State of Idaho did a thorough, double-blind study of drinking and driving. Their conclusion was that at 0.10% BAC, the vast majority of drivers were not affected enough to significantly impair their driving. "Significantly", using measures of driving ability like driving straight without weaving, reaction time, and so on.
They changed the legal BAC to 0.08% anyway, even though there was no evidence that it would make anybody safer, for no other reason than pressure from the Federal government, .
It appears there was a typographical error in my [i] tag.
Without statistics on what percentage of people are driving buzzed, you can't make the assertion that they are a greater risk than the general population. To get usable statistics, the police need to randomly pull over people who are doing nothing wrong and subject them a breathalyzer test with the promise that this will not be used against them no matter what they blow (so that your statistics aren't distorted by having to wait to get a blood test) and find out how many people are actually driving buzzed.
Once you have that information, the analysis is fairly trivial. If the percentage of people who blow over a particular limit in a random sampling is significantly less (statistical significance here) than the percentage of at-fault drivers who tested over that limit, then the limit is too high, because those people are causing a disproportionate number of accidents. If the percentage of randomly selected people who blow over that limit is similar to or more than the percentage of at-fault drivers, then the limit is either about right or unreasonably low, and might even be doing more harm than good.
To put it less abstractly, if 60% of accidents are caused by someone who is driving at or above some particular level of buzz (say .02), but 80% of drivers are buzzed by that standard, then the buzzed drivers are being so much more attentive than average drivers that they are actually causing fewer accidents than other people. Thus, penalizing them further does not increase safety. If 60% of accidents are caused by someone who is driving while buzzed (by that same standard), and only 5% of drivers are buzzed (by that standard), then the buzzed drivers are causing many more accidents than your average person, and penalizing them would increase safety.
Without a complete picture, any assertion that lowering or raising the limit will have any particular effect on the number of accidents is basically pure speculation, with no scientific basis. It's like reading that 73% of males develop male pattern baldness and then saying that MPB is more common in males than the general population, without knowing what percentage of non-males exhibit MPB. It happens to be correct, but without that additional piece of information, the conclusion is a non sequitur. This is really no different than the cell phone bans, and their logic is faulty for precisely the same reason.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I was rear-ended in a similar situation, too. But the other driver wasn't drunk. So my anecdote cancels yours. (Sorry about the accident).
Of course, that would be reasonable, and remove most people from driving.
ftfy; lose 50% of the remainder if you test for intelligence, too
and let's make sure celebrity drunks get punished in celebrity fashion. Make it like Finland where the fine is a % of your income, with the income going directly to increased enforcement. In addition to losing your license. In addition to community service. Just like smoking in movies, celebrities are examples to us all. Let's make them an example of what not to do when they drink and drive.
I come here for the love
but interkin3tic "ASSURED" you.
his/her assurance is enough to convince me! /chugs an entire keg like bender, jumps behind the wheel, assured that i'll stay alert/
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Their test is far from scientific in this particular instance. They have a small sample size (Kary, Grant, and Tory), and practically no repeatability. I'm always agitated when they claim they "prove" human-based myths by their own ancedotal testing. Especially considering the fact that they're normally very thorough and scientific with other types of myths.
Ok, lets Mythbust your argument. We don't even need a show, or studies, we just need logic.
What's your BAC right now? 0? no... you have Alcohol in your blood at all times. It's part of most foods.
Have you ever known someone that seemed to be able to drink like a fish and then drive home without a problem?
How about someone that couldn't drink a single beer without swerving all over the road?
We all know both types... so how is it that we can set a universal standard that really has little bearing on the individuals ability to drive?
The NTSB wants people to NOT drink and drive. They could give a shit less about your BAC, they just don't want you to drink at all. That's their job, they want to make travel as safe as possible. That doesn't mean their recommendations are even remotely practical.
The fact of the matter is we have an excellent process for determining if you're safe to drive. The police officer notices un-safe behavior, pulls you over and administers the Standardized field sobriety test. This test is superior to blood tests in almost every way. .01% but they also just got done eating a half ounce of mushrooms, there's no blood test for that. But they are certainly impaired.
They are impartial, the weight, race and gender of the person being tested is irrelevant.
They are videotaped by the squadcars dash cam in most cases and can be reviewed later by both defense and prosecution.
They test the SOBRIETY of the person in question, which is what we care about right? Where-as blood tests and breathalyzers test for the presence of certain chemicals in the bloodstream, which in many cases are not the actual intoxicant. Also, blood tests are limited to what you're testing. If a persons BAC is
They do not impinge on the health privacy of a person that may very well be innocent. Once that blood is drawn, many law enforcement agencies are actually sequencing DNA, and doing all sorts of other tests without the subjects permission.
Drunk driving is a problem in this country, but law enforcement is not the solution to the problem. Treatment, education, and cheaper public transportation are the solution. I remember that when I was in college, every bar in the small town I lived in would have all cars towed from their parking lots in the morning. Every morning. It was a boon to the local impound service, but what did it do to the drunk driving rates in town? How easy would it have been to pass a city ordinance that prevented them from towing a car for 24hrs?
Alcoholism is listed as an illness in DSM-4 (303.90 Alcohol Dependence, among many more).
So tell me, why do we punish those who have it?
Should we punish people with cancer? With schizophrenia? Should we jail those with obesity or high blood pressure?
We all know that this limit drop is not about public health, it's about money. More fines, more fees, more punishment.
It will not solve the problem.
There are some well-known solutions to the problem. We don't use those solutions, because the government likes both the flow of money and a brow-beaten populace, and gives lip service to concern for collateral damage.
It disgusts me.
In Australia for fully licences drivers you can be no higher than .05 . It's ruthlessly enforced and all traffic police can stop you at any time for a random breath test.. They deploy booze and drug testing busses and I have seen them block a 3 lane freeway nicking 100s of motorists.. If you refuse to take the test you loose your licence on the spot. If you fail you loose your licence on the spot..
You can be jailed even if you don't cause an accident.
I was the first group to have 00 BAC and its something I stick with even as a fully licenced driver..
To be honest your society will benefit from it..
Um, no. The dangers of texting, phone calls, alcohol etc is that they distract you from even recognizing that you are in a potentially dangerous situation.
And clearly not in a town that has random or total breath testing (where they put up a roadblock and breath test all passing drivers).
Look this is not ideal for folks who want to go out and have a large drink with dinner.
Look, being maimed or killed by a drunk driver is not ideal for the tens of thousands of people it happens to.
Your right to consume an "ideal" quantity of alcohol in a restaurant and then drive home....does not supersede my right to travel without being injured, maimed, or killed.
Have someone else drive. Get a taxi. Have the alcohol at home. Drink less alcohol at dinner. Stay at the restaurant longer. Go for a walk after dinner.
Please help metamoderate.
You mean the same episode where it showed being tired or distracted by cell phones or anything else were actually significantly more impairing than the alcohol?
I don't think we should get rid of drunk driving laws by any stretch of the imagination. However, there are already plenty of distracted/reckless driver laws that exist. I just don't see the a need to create specific laws for every single possible way someone can increase their danger while driving.
No, you're right. YOU don't see a need here at all.
However, the greedy assholes looking to privatize and invest in the ever-growing prison system ARE seeing a need to create more and more specific laws to ensure "demand" exists for their investment, which is exactly why you will find long-standing laws like this being tweaked everywhere. This has nothing to do with what other countries have adopted, or even how bad the drunk driving statistics are (especially when compared to cell phone distractions as you pointed out). This has everything to do with making certain individuals very rich.
And this move is peanuts. Just wait until they re-define "mental" issues legally as they lock up all those tea party "terrorists". If you thought a prisoner was profitable, just wait until you see how much they'll make off "patients"...
I noticed today that about 2 out of every 3 cars failed to use a turn signal at all. About half that did utilize their turn indicators did so "after" they started their turn. This morning before sunrise while it was almost light about 1 out of every 10 cars had no lights on. On and on and on. And the police generally don't even bother with it. I spent 3 years in Germany and coming back to Georgia was like a shock. I knew it was bad before but after 3 years in a country where they don't tolerate shitty driving I was going nuts. Don't even get me started on the stupid asses going 62 in the fast lane on I-75 (plenty of Yankees doing that as well as home folks.) The average driving skill level in the US is so far below that of Germany that it is just dismally depressing.
This is incompatible with an infrastructure that is so hostile towards public transportation (outside of some lucky big cities). I live in some backwater suburb in FL and I can't get to a pub to have a couple of drink with a buddy without incurring an extra 20$ in cab fare?
So you knew that "going out drinking" was something you like to do, and you chose to live in an area that is incompatible with that? The problem isn't that you live in the wrong area. The problem is that you ignored that you were living in the wrong area and felt entitled to engage in dangerous and/or illegal behavior as "compensation" for a decision you made.
Step one: find some drinking buddies.
Step two: rotate designated driver duty.
Or, alternatively: get off your ass and WALK. Watch out for the drunk drivers.
Please help metamoderate.
... I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14.
I was driving fairly well at age 5, solo. A few years later I was ready to deal with (light, semi-rural) traffic--all before the teen age hormones and crazy behavior kicked in. Most people don't realize how good the control system is in a car--as long as the driver is actually paying attention.
"That's about one drink for a woman weighing less than 120 lbs., two for a 160 lb. man."
Of what? Wine? 3.2 beer? Everclear? How many Olympic-sized swimming pools of this mystery liquid would it take to put half a football field full of average-sized men (lined up head to feet) over the new legal limit?
Suck it, AP.
Any time I read a study that has language like "associated with" or "related" my BS meter starts to go off. If they could say it was directly attributable, they would. This is like all the "speed related" accidents, where the "speed related" box gets checked if one vehicle is 1 mph over the speed limit regardless of the actual causal factor of the crash.
They forgot to specify the unit. Is it 0.5 hundredth of pounds per gallon?
.05 has been the limit in Australia since the 70s. You can still have fun and drive home, just need to watch what you have
If you're impaired, you're impaired. It doesn't matter the cause, nor some arbitrary tests. There are people that can drive fine at over 0.10, and there are people who are entirely dysfunctional at 0.01. There are also people that are wholly impaired at 0.00, generally these would be sleep deprived folks, some even on loads of caffeine or other uppers (witness all those single truck accidents - driver "fell asleep". Note that truckers can only drive 11 hours at a stretch according to federal law .
So is 0.05 ridiculous? Yes, for some it's too high. For the large majority of the population, it's ridiculously low. It's also gender biased. Women are more deeply affected by alcohol so should men be held to the same standard?
What's the real answer to this problem? Making a license a privilege, and losing one meaningful and a much more realistic option.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
No, it wouldn't.
People generally over-estimate their own abilities, and drunk-drivers typically think they're the Bruce Willis of drunk driving...he can get up and run across broken glass, kill terrorists and blow up buildings even after being beaten up and shot, and they can drive a car perfectly even while they're shit-faced drunk.
Nothing will convince them otherwise, so even if they were able to rationally assess the penalties and risks while they're drunk, they're just not going to think it applies to them because "I'm a drinking hero, I'm not drunk, I can drive".
0.08 is seriously fucking impaired. Anyone who thinks they're capable of driving safely with a BAC of 0.08 is deluded. 0.05 is the point at which alcohol-caused impairment starts going from being mild and not statistically significant in contributing to accidents, to serious impairment with a statistically very significant contribution to causing accidents.
This is a *fact*, backed up by numerous studies, and anecdotal accounts of "I can hold my liquor" are deluded fantasy bullshit.
...As for raising the driving age to 22? I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14. That way you have a chance to learn to drink in a supervised setting with adults who (theoretically) know how to drink safely, and you have a chance to get all the stupid "hey guys, check this out!" stories out of your system before you're ever allowed near the wheel of a car.
Yeah, and I guess that whole "alcoholism" thing is just bullshit propaganda, and there is no such thing as physical addiction to alcohol. Soooooo...let's bring on the 14-year olds and teach them how to tap that keg!
You know what I've been saying for years? Some people are fucking morons.
I'm the AC that wrote that. Drive over 0.08 all the time. I've never had a problem.
You're not statistically significant.
He is a statistic waiting to happen though.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
yeah, and i play pool much better after a beer or two than I do completely sober. a *little* alcohol to relax helps me to play better.
I wouldn't want to drive at that level, though. My reaction times will be slowed and I'll not notice things that I should (like traffic conditions, traffic signs, pedestrian crossings, kids chasing balls etc), and the roads are full of crazy bad drivers that require me to be performing at my best.
Controlling a cue and hitting a ball into a pocket across a few feet of felt-covered table is a very different thing to controlling a vehicle moving at 60-100 Kph.
at those speeds, the same relaxed confidence that helps me play pool better makes me a much worse, much more dangerous driver.
It is de facto prohibition, and unconstitutional.
!!! [$INSERT STRONGLY WORDED HYPERBOLA] !!!
Except no one says you must get into a car after having some drinks. Unless you think that's the next part of the constitutional conspiracy, requiring all alcohol drinkers to get into a car after having a drink.
Sure that is ridiculous, but so is what you said.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
People can't pay attention when a long laundry list is being cited.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Here is scientific evidence; the sweet spot is above 0.08. Look at the curve, at 0.08 you are indeed impaired, a little above, you get into super human driving abilities. So, what we need is actually making it illegal to drive above or below the sweet spot.
https://xkcd.com/323/
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
.08% BAC is just the level at which they must prosecute. Anything below that is game if they can prove (or even hint at) that you're impaired. A friend of mine got a DUI charge for having a .01% BAC (tested by blood and extrapolated back to the time of the arrest). No one wanted to prosecute when it came back they were at .01%, except for some hotshot new prosecutor. They 'offered' him a deal where he could just lose his license for a year and do 30 days in jail, he got out of it with a two minute statement from a lawyer saying that probably 2/3rds of the courtroom was .01% BAC this very instant, from the beer they had the night before at dinner.
And drunk as well, so not the best judge of his driving skills. He's probably also incredibly witty, and charms every women he meets - when he's drunk.
you guesstimate that 80% of drivers have had a drink before getting on the road?
That explains SO much...
I think there are many other (more) dangerous things in and around cars. We should also consider:
-banning car stereo systems that have buttons and knobs
-banning nagging wives & husbands in the car
-children should be separated and caged so they don't fight thus distracting drivers
-eating and smoking should be
-a 'sleep-a-lizer' device so people don't fall asleep driving to and from work (happens all the time)
-and definitely ban all hot women from walking on the streets. Hot women must walk the back alleys, but perhaps the ugly ones can walk the main streets.
Seriously, how many rear-enders have been caused by looking at someone else's rear end??
Mostly it just gives the authoritarians a cheap thrill.
So the Constitution grants you the right to operate an automobile?
No, and I don't guess that 5% have, either. Those numbers were entirely arbitrary.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Seriously, nearly 1/2 a dozen times I have followed severely drunk drivers. Not a tipsy slowed down reflexes drunk. A swerving all over the road drunk. And guess how many times the police gave a damn to even respond.
Meanwhile I had to follow these cars, flash my lights and honk my horn every time they almost hit another vehicle or guardrail. So if 0.20% alcohol doesn't mean crap to police. Than why should we lower the limit?
This sort of legislation, combined with my area's complete lack of public transport, is why I hope self-driving cars come sooner rather than later.
Look this is not ideal for folks who want to go out and have a large drink with dinner. But on Mythbusters, they've done a number of driving myths at .07999% BAC, and the results are pretty dramatic. You are definitely impaired at .08%.
The thing about drinking is that you dont feel impaired. Even if you have trouble standing up, you still feel invincible. Despite this, you are impaired. Judgement, reaction speed and balance are very much affected by drinking.
With drinking and driving, you have to learn to manage your drinks. In Australia 0.05 is the limit, 0.05-0.08 attracts a fine and demerit points, above 0.08 and it's time to go to court and possibly lose your license (depends on what the BAC was, any previous convictions and how the judge feels. You might walk away with a fine.
But back to what I said about feeling bulletproof whilst your drunk. Drunk people are terrible judges, not just of their own ability to drive but of attractiveness, martial prowess, humour and a bunch of other traits... Lets just say drunk people are poor judges of just about everything but most of all their ability to drive. Because of this, taking a hard line against drink driving is a good thing.
I'm sure there's a crapload of scientific evidence to back up these empirical observations. But if you haven't noticed the same thing you've either not been to enough parties or get way too drunk too early.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
For the love of Junior Johnson... .05 is less than a piece of my mother's rum cake.. In fact, it's likely less than most people would blow if pulled over pulling out of church after taking communion..
Such f'in BS!
Am I the only one sick and tired of the militant MADD prohibition BS???? That's what these assholes really want, prohibition. Fuck them all!
Enough of the "For the children" propaganda and BS!!!
To quote George Carlin, "FUCK THE CHILDREN!"
So much whining. In Australia we have RBT's where an officer can pull you over at random to test your BAC is below 0.05%.
How can we all possibly live? Our entire society must be falling apart because you can't have a third beer in the first hour of your binge.
No, reasonable people can understand that evidence appears on a scale. And reasoanble people can understand that Mythbusters is near the bottom.
Meanwhile over here in Australia it's been the norm for years and you useless jerks still depict us as a bunch of drunken corkhat wearing bushmen.
de facto prohibition? unconstitutional? They're very entertaining words.
You know what else is an entertaining word?
Cockhead.
I'm not sure I feel safer with some of these "bureaucratic roadblocks" out of the way. As it is already in many states one is required to submit to a BAC test if asked by a police officer or they will lose their license. This is a complete violation of our right of presumed innocence. With the laws as they are now every driver stopped is assumed to be drunk until they prove otherwise to the officer.
I'm no fan of drunk driving laws. They've become less of a means to preserve safety and become more of a movement to reestablish alcohol prohibition. If a person is a danger on the road then stop them. I don't care how much alcohol is in their blood, and the law should not either.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Eventually your luck will run out, even if not necessarily because of being caught (we'll get back to that), but because you'll cause an accident. When the road situation is relaxed, you are safe. As soon as things get tight or there's something unexpected, your performance is impaired, and it's simple objective measures such as reaction times and visual acuity we're talking about.
Now, nystagmus leads to loss of visual acuity at higher spatial frequencies while, perhaps counterintuitively, boosting the contrast at lower spatial frequencies.
This means that if you get motion-induced nystagmus, as you're likely to at 0.08% BAC and up, you won't be able to read the fucking speedometer or even roadside signs, and your brain will be substituting expected values for actual ones. That's how some drunk drivers are getting caught, and they swear they were not speeding. That's how some military and aerobatic pilots end up with doing controlled flights into terrain in instrument conditions - they don't see the artificial horizon without realizing it.
What you may also find scary is that people's susceptibility to various ototoxins (substances that impair the vestibular system) can vary a lot, and alcohol is not the only ototoxin out there. You can get same problems simply by being exposed to organic solvents.
I have congenital nystagmus and a mild case of myopia (-1.25 in both eyes). Luckily without correction I have 20/30 acuity and 20/20 with correction.
I cannot attest to what drunken-induced nystagmus people experience (since, technically I have it all the time) but how you describe it is somewhat different to what actually happens in (my) reality.
No, every single one of there tests have been seriously flawed. IN fact, anything involving driving on the show borders on surprisingly stupid.
That's not even getting into the issue that the issue is reflexes and response time, so you should test reflexes and response time, not how much of X is in your system.
Of course, that would be reasonable, and remove most people over 60 from driving.
Except, of course, for the fact that safe driving involves more than reflexes and response time - if you want to remove the least safe drivers from the road, that would be drivers under the age of 24 - they have a much higher accident rate than average (even higher than drivers over 75). But it's the 25 - 55 year olds that get into the most drunk driving accidents. The 55-75 year olds have the lowest accident rate.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1114.pdf
It's about as feasible as lowering the BAC to .05% and would probably save more lives.
One would remove the ability to drive legally for everyone for an additional three years, and the other would remove the ability to drive legally for as long as it took for one's BAC to drop below 0.05 and only if they consumed alcohol in the first place.
I'm fairly certain the only sense in which lowering the BAC to .05% and increasing the driving age to 21 are similar in terms of feasibility is that police can equally apply different road laws.
Be fair, we are drunken corkhat wearing bushmen. We just know better than to pretend it is a good idea to be driving drunken corkhat wearing bushmen.
(Actually, I'm lying about the corkhat and bushmen).
It's injuries as well. Anyway, tendency here seems not to want to improve safety, that's fine. I've seen you lot drive between the texting, phone calls, huge mugs of coffee and reading the newspaper.
Perhaps YOU are impaired at .08%, but a percentage of alcohol in the blood doesn't tell the whole story. I recently gave up drinking (unless it's a social event), and I used to consume 8+ beers and be pretty much fine (daily). I just had a beer and a large glass of wine after dinner (after losing 50 lbs and cutting drinking for 4 months) and I'm ready for a nap. I wouldn't trust me with a wooden spoon, much less a 5,000lb automobile.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Federal government power creep like this is just the kind of government abuse-of-power that the constitution was designed to protect citizens from.
"Punishing / controlling / taxing everyone for the mistakes or hostility of a few"
The people know that the majority of cops and government wonks that support this proposed law have broken this proposed law at some point in their lives. Probably last night.
This is the Federal government equivalent of your local city altering its street parking ticketing times in increase revenues off of its citizens. It's not about the cause, it's about sucking money out of, well, you.
Feds: "We can ship you off to war to die for your country, but you can't have a beer. And when it comes to drinking and driving, do as we say, and not as we do."
Problem is, half the electorate laps this up in the name of good intentions. And boy have the feds and politicians have figured out they can manipulate the want of citizen's good intentions to their personal, short term, collective (for-them) needs.
so you want to waste tax money, add more law enforcement, bloat the courts, to pass laws for everything!! you say one thing about not adding 5,000 laws, but have no problem adding a bunch of laws under one category.
cars are machines, they are not lazy boy chairs and that is exactly what people think when they drive, they feel safe or people think they are safe because they are surrounded by comfy seats and metal/plastic.
where does it stop, are you going to pass laws that you have to have a monitoring chip inserted into anyone with a driving license to make sure they get a required 8 hours of sleep before driving, or have a car with a scan abilities to scan for alcohol, drug (legal or illegal), lack of sleep, or it determines you are to depressed, or emotionally stressed, and you are not allowed to drive.
Usually, I would establish "less safe" with video and audio recordings of the driver's inability to maintain lane and other moving violations, as well as my encounter with the driver, and the sobriety tests administered during the stop of the particular individual.
Bravo, dear sir or madam. This is exactly how it should be done.
A lot of these replies seem to be from people that do not drink at all, or they simple cannot handle a little alcohol.
These studies seem biased, the opinions that are published are ones that overwhelmingly cannot agree or disagree, they come to a conclusion, and that conclusion is the worst case opinion, you find in those studies that there are people who can drink and stay at that 0.08% and drive and react normally, and ones that fail. It depends on a person, amount of sleep, what they or if they eat, also drugs (prescription or street) and those effects can last for days before a person drinks any alcohol, you could go on and on with the other factors that I wonder if studies take into account, even if they did you have to assume the person answering the questions are 50/50% on telling the truth.
Sure, mythbusters is a valid indicator for truth, even if not perfet. But when you've got mountainloads of scientific and statistical material available, why would you cite Mythbusters as your "proof" that all the real research is wrong?
16-25 year olds have the best reaction time and visual acuity of any drivers on the road yet they get into the most wrecks and therefore have the highest insurance rates. NHTSA says that drivers aged 64-69 are the safest on the road. Perhaps reaction time and visual acuity aren't nearly as important as other factors?
No, every single one of there tests have been seriously flawed. IN fact, anything involving driving on the show borders on surprisingly stupid.
But I still can't can't get over the episode where golf ball style dimples on the body improved the gas mileage so significantly. That one blew my mind.
-- riverat1 posting AC to preserve mods.
16 years of no accidents... I may or may not drive above .05/.08 at times.
Some folks want there to be a zero tolerance level, which means you'll go to jail if you use mouthwash in the morning.
IMHO the prosecution of victimless crimes needs to stop. If you're going 160mph out on a country road in the middle of nowhere or driving your car completely drunk up and down the driveway it doesn't matter. What matters is when you hurt someone else.
Another AC who would like to offer evidence that at least one other AC tries to be more alert after consuming drinks.
How do you propose we define and measure "driving dangerously"?
This idea just leads to arbitrarines if you let the police make this decision. There's more than enough willkuer already, thank you very much.
Read as: even more money to the prison industry. Church-based law re-purposed for corporate lucre. Bonus: the poorest and ethnic minorites will be trapped by this dragnet while UMC whites slip through the holes via Dr. Drew style rehab BS.
The problem with these laws is compliance. You have a speedometer in order to judge your compliance with speeding laws. You have no way of knowing if your BAC is .05 or .08. Yeah, sure, if you're loaded, you know to stay away from vehicles but it's hard to drink AND comply at lower levels. To solve this problem my wife and I walk when we go out. I suggest others do the same....
The only statistic that actually matters for this is: how many accidents are caused by drunk drivers with BAC at .05-.08. Until I know that, I can neither support nor oppose this new law.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
People actually do accidentally drink and drive. Alcohol can have dramatic effects on some people. Blind drunks as they are called may not be able to give even their name or know what state they are in or where they have been for weeks, months or years. At a certain point they even lack the capacity to form intent. They are not on auto pilot. It is more like they are on zombie pilot. To climb in a car and careen along can be reflexive rather than cogent in nature. Sadly such people are at the far end of addiction and do not have the capacity to stop or limit or delay taking a drink. Even if taken into custody and the finest long term care is provided many will never be able to act upon their own control again.
The real deal is that prohibition is the issue. We did not have the will to make prohibition stick . That battle was lost. Now society seeks some sort of watered down prohibition. Right now it can't work. We simply have too many degenerates clogging the prison system. When you get right down to the bottom of it people in prison, just like drunks, simply can not control their behavior or lack the capacity not to get caught. In other words they all are incompetent one way or another.
LMFTFY:
peer reviewed studies >>> mythbusters >>> a flaming bag of poop on someone's doorstep >>> AC's personal testimony.
As a non-US resident, it's baffling that there is even an argument here. You're not supposed to drink and drive -- why is there any argument on that???
While I agree with what your saying, I wonder how that holds up in court after the fact. It would seem to me that the lack of cut and dried evidence (like BAC results proving impairment) would make it harder to prosecute successfully giving the defendant's lawyer plenty of wiggle room. I would think that when impairment is based on subjective assessment an officer's perception could be just as skewed as a drunk who thinks he's ok to drive.
I do drink personally, but I do so at home for the most part. When I do go out I let my wife drive (she doesn't drink) even if I've only had one over the course of dinner. In most instances I'm sure that I could drive if I needed to, but why take the risk if I don't have to? Even after one drink my mood is lighter, my reaction time might be slightly reduced, my attentivness might be impacted, etc. To the point where I'm weaving all over the road? No. But what if a kid ran out in front of me? What if the guy in front of me had to stop fast? What if someone abruptly changed lanes into me? Now it's possible that I might hurt someone else, or my family, or myself just because I chose to drive under the influence. It all comes down to personal responsibility.
With that aforementioned 1 drink @ 200 lbs over the course of 1 hr. I'd still be well below .05% so the change in the law would do absolutely zilch to mitigate that risk. It's still up to me as an individual to make wise choices.
And reasoanble people can understand that Mythbusters is near the bottom.
They do repeat experiments under weak controls. There are many much lower ranks, including uncontrolled experiments, anecdotes, friend of a friend, folklore, legends, etc.
Let me put it another way, Mythbusters is the most scientific-method TV program that is widely watched. That is how far it is from the bottom.
There are plenty of people killed by drunk drivers every year to suggest that the additional alertness that they think they have doesn't help.
Yes reactions to substances vary from person to person. But reactions to a substance can also vary rather suddenly in an individual as well. Anybody that has ever had one beer hit them hard on a hot day knows what i mean. I'm not a drinker and usually might go for many years without a taste of alcohol. But normally if I had one beer it doesn't have any effect on me. But once I stopped for lunch on a hot day and must have been slightly car sick. I had one beer with a slow lunch and the next thing I was sitting on the curb as I was dizzy and actually felt drunk. An hour of rest and all was well. But I did learn that one can not really count on one's normal tolerance to a substance.
There are plenty of comments here defending driving after drinking.
Frankly, I am amazed. Especially about the people who comment that they see plenty of other drivers on the road who suck: you're advocating that these crappy drivers should be allowed on the road after drinking.
Really, drink XOR drive.
0.05 is unreasonable. It is de facto prohibition, and unconstitutional.
Unconstitutional, seriously?
This is a restriction on drinking then driving, where exactly is that a guaranteed right in the Constitution?
Because there is a chance that regular folk might actually look up the reference or even in fact already seen it, as opposed to pay-walled academic research?
Just like a good lecturer after explaining a principle might illustrate it with something we are already familiar (e.g. and that is why the sky is red at night) instead of "as confirmed by [X,Y 2001]".
In Sweden, if you got a DUI, they don't throw you into a PMIA prison right away or lock you up for life on the third DUI, do they? (something that has happened to poor defendants in the USA) Don't they have some sort of records sealing so that if you serve your punishment you can actually still get a job because employers cannot find out about it?
Remember this... you may be able to drive competently with a BAC higher than 0.08%, but all it takes is for someone to hit you. You may not technically be at fault when the pimple-faced newb rear-ends you... but you'll still be charged with A) driving impaired, B) refusing the breathalyser or C) leaving the scene of an accident.
The accident doesn't have to be your fault for you to be charged. Don't let some other idiot decide your fate.
Like mentioned before "driving under the influence" and "driving while intoxicated" are two separate issues. If you want to have a hard limit for driving under the influence, which doesn't represent your physical ability to drive well or not, that is fine and it is an arbitrary number. It should be a fine, and it should trigger road-side testing. If you are "impaired" through a series of road-side test you are driving while intoxicated. Conversely, if you are under the limit, but seem intoxicated, it doesn't matter what your BAC is, the same road-side tests should be involved.
I work in the ER, I have seen people with surprisingly high BAC who are quite functional. Those people are chronically intoxicated, and have adjusted appropriately. Same goes true with the current narcotic epidemic. I have seen people on chronic narcotics who are quite functional and seem surprised when I tell them they shouldn't be driving on their 80 mg twice daily of long acting narcotic and 15 mg every 4 hours of a short acting narcotic.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
In many States, 0.08 is just the point where you are assumed (prima facie evidence) to be too impaired to operate a motor vehicle. Technically, you could be arrested/convicted under .08 or acquitted over 0.08.
Lowering the level to 0.05 isn't going to effect the repeat offenders with BACs of 1.0+ who know how to play the system to lower their likelihood of a conviction.
It is already 0.05 here.
All it does is make a mockery of the law.
First of all, a police officer isn't going to test everyone. They are going to test A) those that show driving impairment (or smell like booze I suppose), and B) those that pass by those occasional checkpoints.
Two things are going to be the result, neither of them positive to the whole idea of DUI enforcement.
First more people are going to be breaking the law, and not being caught. This will cause people to not take it seriously. People will be over 0.05 all the time, while showing no impairment, and not being tested. Which will then start giving people the idea, who cares about the law. It's like driving 120kph on the 401 in Ontario, it is against the law, but no one pays any attention to it anymore, including the police.
Second, for those that do get caught, by passing though some sort of random check point crack down (even then you would have to look impaired), people will be incredulous about it "What do you mean I blew over, I only had two drinks! Do you really think I am impaired?" label it bullshit and write it off as simply a ludicrous law further eroding its legitimacy.
You are also going to have more people challenging the accuracy of the measurement devices, which there have been a lot of proven problems in the past.
That's nothing! Did you see the episode where they compared it to being tired!
With the current social norm seeming to be, that not sleeping is somehow "cool" (instead of moronic), and drinking loads of coffee to stay awake as long as possible. one must assume that the majority of people are constantly overtired and not fit to drive a car.
Compared to that, things like 0.08% BAC are almost not even noteworthy!
Why the hell we're testing for BAC instead of the actual ability to react to reflexes and make good decisions is still beyond me...
Instead of a breathalyzer, they should invent a portable driving game console, and demand a certain level of proficiency in that....
He's probably an alcoholic and as such would be able to consume far more than you or me and still be safe. An alcoholic friend of mine walked to the hospital once where she was pegged at over .4. That's twice as much alcohol as would kill most people.
A teetotaler having the first drink in his life would almost certainly be unsafe at .05, especially if he was also tired.
That depends on whether a particular bus system offers free transfers. If not, it's $1.60 to the station, $1.60 to the destination, $1.60 back to the station, and $1.60 home.
I much preferred Metro for my commute.
I read that as "I much preferred Metro for my computer" and did a double-take.
you chose to live in an area that is incompatible with that
Not everybody who inherits a house happens to have the opportunity to choose where it is located.
Is it your fault, for living in a backwater suburb instead of within walking distance?
Or is it employers' fault for not letting people keep their job even after they've moved out of reasonable commuting distance?
Maybe it's the Central Committee's fault, for making it so that laying miles and miles of rail and running trains is expensive, when they should have dictated that it's cheap, so that backwater suburbs would have public transportation.
That or it's Chevy's fault for buying public transit services to shut them down.
an increase in stolen plates (because you can't get your tabs without a license...)
Where I live, a new driver is required to provide his own vehicle for the driving test. If someone who doesn't already have a driver's license can't get a number plate, then how can he lawfully proceed with the driving test? But then I think Indiana is trying to transition away from individual driving in the first place because Indiana recently introduced a 50-hour supervised driving requirement, and 50 hours of driving lessons at $60 per hour would cost enough to turn off a lot of people from driving in the first place.
It looks like there are (at least) two different ways of looking at the word "impaired," relating to exactly what you're benchmarking the driver's state relative to. Are we comparing it to average (or worst) drivers or are we comparing it to the same driver?
Maybe you are as good a driver at 0.99% as I am at 0.049%. It's possible. There's a school of thought out there, though, which says this is irrelevant unless (!) you're also as good as driver at 0.99% as you are at 0%. Are you? [Sloppy's finger tembles, hovering over the "call bullshit" button.]
Are we trying to punish people for being bad drivers, or are we trying to punish them for not being the best drivers they can be? Half of the population consists of below-average drivers, but we don't appear to have any policies where these people are continually tested and ticketed for being bad drivers. Why not? Because the fuckwits (*) are either trying but suck and we give them a break so they don't rebel, or we haven't figured out an objective way to demonstrate the fact that they aren't really trying as hard as they could.
There's probably a lot of truth in that first possibility: we accept that half the population drives bad, because pointing cars at us accidentally is probably safer than getting them mad where half the population they point guns at us the other half and says "let me drive or else." But I prefer to idly ponder the second possibility.
The "neat" thing about blood alcohol testing is that whether it's a perfect indicator or not, at some point you have an objective number that represents [handwave] something, and we all know how to work with numbers. If we could arrest people for driving while impaired, in cases where they were impaired because they were yelling at the kids in the backseat at 4.4 syllables per second which is over the unsafe threshold of 2.5 syllables per second, we probably would do it! But we don't have the measurements to point to, just like we don't yet have the brainwave measurements that show a driver was daydreaming (i.e. impaired) (**) instead of consciously paying attention.
(*) Wait, did I just call half the population fuckwits? Geez, I'm such an asshole.
(**) In my personal experiences of my own collisions or speeding tickets, daydreaming is impairment #1, the most common cause of me being unaware of what was about to happen. But you can't measure it (yet), so you can't prove it, so, so nyaah nyaah!!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The problem is that we want to punish certain dangerous behaviour even if it doesn't cause an accident, e.g. drinking and driving. Since the level of impairment we want to punish is low enough to not be noticeable to a cop watching someone drive along normally there has to be some other kind of test, and unless you want to come up with some reaction time measurement then a blood-alcohol limit is about the only way to do it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There is no excuse for drinking and driving.
So how should people who live in a city where buses don't run on Sundays get home from church? In denominations where all adult members are expected to eat a piece of matzo and drink a small amount of wine, there aren't going to be a lot of designated drivers. Besides, there are ways to blow greater than 0.00% even if you haven't been drinking. For example, some dental hygiene products leave alcohol in the mouth without putting any measurable amount into the bloodstream.
I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14. That way you have a chance to learn to drink in a supervised setting with adults who (theoretically) know how to drink safely, and you have a chance to get all the stupid "hey guys, check this out!" stories out of your system before you're ever allowed near the wheel of a car.
I know it isn't like this in every state but in Illinois and Wisconsin you can legally drink under 21 when supervised by a parent or guardian (basically "family setting"). You just can't order it or buy it. The two states have different variations on the law pertaining to where you can do that. Last I checked in Wisconsin you can drink in a bar just not order the drinks and not sit AT the physical bar. You have to be at a table and the guardian must bring the drinks to you. In Illinois you can't do that, basically has to be at a home.
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, just have relatives who tend or own bars or are in law enforcement.
Yes, you can still refuse. But if you do so, it's an automatic suspension of your license (in Tennessee, it's one year).
So what's the penalty if you blow an 0.08, but the blood test shows 0.00?
You're not wrong, but using the generic reckless driving laws requires proving that the driver was actually being reckless, which inevitably leads to a long trial where the suspect argues that they were still taking due care despite their self-imposed handicap. When you enumerate badness you get to skip proving whether something is bad, and simply have to prove the suspect was doing the action. This is why we have laws against specific things like drunk driving and text messaging.
Since driving does involve a huge set of skills that cannot be fully learned without practice, raising the driving age will only have the effect of pushing the high accident rate group to still be the first age group allowed to drive
You've missed the point of what I was getting at though. It's not that people who are new to driving have a higher rate of accidents, it's that you take people who are new to driving, and give them something else new to do which lowers their inhibitions and impairs their judgement. Not only are they still learning how to drive safely, they're also learning how to drink safely.
It's not that I want to raise the driving age, it's that I want people to learn to drink safely before they're allowed behind the wheel of a car.
I recall a study that concerned the accuracy of the BAC meters -- turns out it's not very good, with about 0.05% variance. Which may explain the variability of what's considered "drunk" as much as do individual tolerances.
0.05% testing variance and 0.05% as the threshold for DUI -- you can see the problem: someone who has drunk nothing at all could test "legally drunk".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
This is ridiculous and won't affect anything. The problem isn't people checking their BAC and seeing that they're under .008 so they think they're safe to drive, the problem is people don't give a shit and drive anyway. Lowering the legal limit to .005 absolutely won't make any difference whatsoever.
Yeah. If they keep it up, they'll lower the limit so low that if you sniff a beer cap, you won't be able to drive for a year.
OK, that's hyperbole, but did you know that eating a piece of hot fresh bread can change your detectable blood alcohol level? Yep.
SO, how low can you go?
I can assure you, on a real road, people tend to stay a bit more alert after consuming a few drinks.
I can assure you, you're a retard, or 19. You NOTICE you are paying more attention, because things you do easily are a chore you have to focus on.
My wife drives like that when sober.
The problem is, I think, really one of measurement. We know how to measure reaction time and certain other things, then we call those "impairment", and talk about it as a few deviations in those few statistics and "impairment" are the same thing.
What about the study that found people who got in accidents with cell phones actually drove differently than other drivers, took more risks, and got in more accidents...even without cell phones. In fact, while most drivers using a phone drive more cautiously, these individuals actually drove less cautiously.
The problem isn't reaction time, its judgement, which is a problem because its very hard to measure directly and put a number on.... but, the evidence I have been looking at leads me to think it is a much more important factor than raw reaction time. A good driver doesn't rely on raw reaction time to keep him safe, and again... thats a judgement issue
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Precise guidelines for arrest and conviction are definitely a good thing, except if you are white and privileged. You would rather simplify the law and leave all the special cases to the prejudices of the cops, which suggests you've had it easy.
You are definitely impaired at .08
This. This is what most people don't understand. People think 0.08 means unimpaired. It doesn't. It is just a compromise.
http://www.mto.gov.on.ca/english/safety/impaired/fact-sheet.shtml
With a BAC of 0.05, an individual’s vision may already be affected in terms of sensitivity to brightness, the ability to determine colours, and depth and motion perception. The brain’s ability to perform simple motor functions is diminished. This means that a driver’s reaction time will be slower and responses will be less accurate. The result is degraded driving performance and a significant increase in collision risk. The increased collision risk of drivers with a BAC from 0.05 to 0.08 (also known as the "warn range") is well documented:
Drivers with a BAC above 0.05 but below the legal limit are 7.2 times more likely to be in a fatal collision
than drivers with a zero BAC. In 2005, 16.7% of drinking drivers killed in Ontario had a BAC less than 0.08.
(emphasis mine)
This is what people need to understand so /. isn't embarrassed by +5 insightful statements like, "but I'm impaired by the kids yelling in the back seat anyway, so what the fuck, I'll have a beer."
Driving dangerously should be the issue, period.
Let me know when you invent that test for potential for driving dangerously before getting into a car.
Oh wait, there already is one. It's called a breathalizer.
I'm the AC that wrote that. Drive over 0.08 all the time. I've never had a problem.
Not only are you a meaningless anecdote, you're an idiotic meaningless anecdote.
who said that? charlie sheen?
This is just their attempts to drive up the arrest rates /tickets for drunk driving, now you an get it by the cops just for having one or two beers..
Let's put the Federal Government in charge of everything, screw the States, eradicate them. Let's let some civil servant, who wasn't elected, and isn't accountable to anybody in charge of everything.
This system worked so well for the Soviet Union, why it was a worker's paradise! The stores were always full of products to buy, the engine of commerce ran perfectly, and everybody was happy.
We don't need no stinkin constitution with separation of powers. Just enlightened, progressive intellectuals with book learning.
Instead of lowering the BAC, let's outlaw bottles and cans. That makes much more sense. We can stop driving and texting by outlawing smart phones. We can stop smoking by outlawing fire. A citizens's army, ratting each other out for more food rations, that's the way to go about this.
Restaurants and Bars? Screw them, They are just evil capitalists exploiting the workers in the name of greed. Liquor producers? They give money to Republicans!! They are pure evil and need to be destroyed. Put every Federal Agency on investigating them. Oh wait, we already did that last one, never mind.
Besides, who gave you the right to decide how much you can drink? The Federal Government knows how you should behave, and think. They know what you should eat, and not eat, and if you want to live in a free, open society you must have the correct words, and thoughts or you are a menace to everyone, and must be eliminated for the good of the overall health of the nation.
Murphy was an optimist
There's an awful lot of whining in this thread. Here's a thought: walk to the bar. So you get home in 20 minutes instead of five.
My one concern with this situation is people need to get a warning, since the first time they may be completely unaware. Once they've been warned they've got a very low tolerance, sure throw the book at them.
Do you not read the replies? The AC expands upon his comments, closing with: "Problem is, you won't find any official data to back that up."
I'm also posting as AC, 'cuz I'm in the same boat: been drinking for as long as I've been driving, had 2 DUIs (decades ago), never an accident (and never had trouble reading the speedo, either.) I also take several meds which warn against driving or operating heavy machinery till the effects are known and understood. Fact is, a habitual drinker will generally do better behind the wheel than an occasional drinker (at the same blood alcohol levels). 'Tis the same with a habitual prescription or non-prescription drug user - you get accustomed to the effects, and adjust accordingly.
I used to have a one hour commute, all on surface streets. I had a large Loony-Tunes glass (from a drive-in) which sat on the console in my van. In the morning it was filled with coffee, in the evening with a can of dark beer. I drove like a saint, mainly because I didn't want to risk being pulled over and getting busted for having an open container. In that situation, drinking while driving made me a safer, politer driver.
[The irony is that if I'd had the beer at a pub before I left, I'd still be under the legal limit - but my drive would have started out with a beer under my belt, instead of starting out cold sober and stretching the one beer over most of the hour.]
I'm not advocating drunk driving. I just wish there was an actual test which would measure the results of drinking, not just the amount - and that that test would be applied to anyone who might be impaired by drugs, drink, or age.
Is it OK to cite "WKRP in Cincinnati"?
Of course, that would be reasonable, and remove most people over 60 from driving.
And (sorry geezers out there) that would be fucking awesome
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
0.05 is unreasonable. It is de facto prohibition, and unconstitutional.
Ignoring the complete non sequitur that is your argument: do you feel the same about the alcohol limits for airline pilots? If not, please explain the difference.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
There's still an absurdly large chunk of the US that has no viable high speed internet not to mention no real public transit. Last place I lived the closest bus stop was 10 miles away and I've lived places where it was MUCH farther to find any public transit. There was no "running up to the corner in your 4WD to get a loaf of bread" (I've seen a similar quote here before) as even Circle K was several miles away and trips to the grocery store were well planned and involved ensuring I had a couple coolers in the back of the truck to keep refrigerated and frozen foods that way on the trip back.
Leave it to an AC to point out the obvious....................
Over the past few decades, the monetary penalties involving alcoholic arrests have progressively increased to the point of becoming big business. The idea of being able to generate a lot of income for local municipalities and state departments has been formalized over the years into an unspoken dirty secret they all know about and quietly enjoy. The (draft exempt) traffic cops, with the same limited life skills of a used car sales tag team, are aware of this and are more than happy to insure this resource by "selling" arrests.
It's easy. Profile a place and time. For example: By parking near a bar or nearby restaurant/fast food place (let's say, between 11 pm and 2 am), then wait for an ideal person or party of the right age group and demeanor to walk out of this business and drive away. After following for awhile, waiting for an infraction--it doesn't really matter, any made up excuse will do--to stop their car and determine if alcohol is involved. KaChing: There is a high probability of success no matter how safe the driving was. If it rarely turns out to be otherwise, then doing the "be careful" song and dance can be invoked. (Most cases, the attitude is of the scripted squat-hop snark learned in training camp that they crudely refer to as part of "the fuck-over routine".)
These preemptive arrests are the side effects of what was intended at one time to prevent accidents caused by alcohol--by invoking extremely stiff penalties on this type of accident when it occurred. The real reason for government employees lowering the definition of drunkenness is greed, pure and simple; and not for the love of their fellow man.
Any time I read in the news that someone gets into a gnarly DWI accident that usually involves serious injuries/death - the BAC was usually well north of 0.15% and the driver is usually well known to local authorities.
So really what's the problem here? Sounds like just another dragnet for cash strapped municipalities to siphon more cash from us.
Yeah sure. Now, HOW ABOUT SOME HIGHER SPEED LIMITS???? Our roads have speed limits that haven't changed significantly in 60 years. This is ridiculous!!
Social Credit would solve everything...
I'm not a lawyer or expert in many state's DUI laws, but AFAIK each state arrests almost 100% of DUI people before an official BAC level is obtained. The breathalyzers on the side of the road are not admissible in court (again not sure in all states, but many) . In most states, the big, accurate breath machine or blood test is done at the jail/police station after the person is arrested. And yes, you can get a DUI with less than the legal limit if you are deemed to not be OK to drive.
Yes, and a lot of lives would be saved by stopping them from driving until they were older.
Young drivers are involved in fatal accidents at a rate very close to the number of fatal accidents involving drunk driving (about 8500 vs 10,000 for drunk drivers).
And about 20% of those involve driving drunk (and 20% of those had BAC of .01 to .07 while 80% had BAC of .08 or higher) (about 330 BAC of .01 to .07 and another 1420 BAC of .08 or higher).
About 8000 adults die in fatal drunk driving crashes. Most of them the drunk drivers or their passengers (and drunk walkers who walk in front of cars). I can't find the numbers, but lowering the BAC limit would save AT MOST 10,000 lives a year. Since we already have dui laws on the books, the reduction would probably be much lower. Assuming a similar breakdown- the adult drivers with .01 to .07 BAC probably number about 1500 per year (in a population of over 100,000,000 adults).
About 5500 seniors die in fatal driving crashes each year. There is a notable decline at 75 and another at 80.
We allow young people AND old people to drive. Combined, the fatal crashes they cause exceed those caused by DUI's.
This doesn't even include tired drivers (who cause thousands of fatalities as well).
We balance between freedom and restrictions every day.
I think lowering the limit to .05 will reduce freedom a lot and reduce deaths a minimal amount (less than 1,000 a year for certain).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I could go for this, if you could get it to be actually enforced. Selective enforcement ("i think drunk drivers are bad, so i'll bust them, but texting, hey, everyone does that, it can't be bad") is a problem. Fill in your own law-enforcement preferred and hated activities. Not only do you have to get police to agree to actually enforce per measured-risk, you have to get cranky old judges who liked things the way they were back then to all be on the same page.
What's the different between what the GP suggests and what we have today?
Its not really rocket science. most beverages should have how many standard drinks are in it. for beers served in glasses find out before hand http://www.alcohol.gov.au/internet/alcohol/publishing.nsf/Content/E9E12B0E00E94FD5CA25718E0081F1DC/$File/std0910.pdf for men 2 standard drinks in the first hour 1 every hour after that will keep at about that limit. 0.05 for women 1 standard drink per hour.
It's not rocket science, but it's not obvious either. Your chart is frankly insane. Who in the world is going to remember any of that when they're out at a bar?!
"1 standard drink" = 1 shot = 1.5oz of ~80 proof. Find me a bar anywhere in the world that pours only 1.5oz of alcohol into any drink.
There simply is no such thing as "1 standard drink", anywhere in the world. It's a completely invalid unit of measure. It's not even the average drink size: Its official size is significantly smaller then any drink served anywhere.
Completely, totally, invalid and meaningless.
My
Say you are 10 times more likely to crash. You are highly unlikely to crash. It's very likely that any one individual deadbeat drunk has a good driving record, but that doesn't mean that you aren't more likely to crash. The problem you are exhibiting is the reason we have 40,000 deaths on the road and nobody cares. "It won't happen to me" with the idea of a low likelihood event repeated many times. The human brain doesn't handle small or large numbers. Your chance to crash on any individual trip rounds to zero. 10x zero = zero. You travel lots of miles in your life. That rounds to infinity. Infinity times zero is undefined. The human brain can't calculate the odds of dying in a car crash. I'm not saying the numbers can't be calculated, but even if explained, a human will not accept it and act in a manner consistent with the numbers.
You are less safe when you think you are more safe.
Learn to love Alaska
"Alcohol concentration levels as low as .01 have been associated with driving-related performance impairment"
Might it be possible that those drivers impaired at .01 are just terrible drivers?
Actually I used this calculator: http://www.ou.edu/oupd/bac.htm for my numbers. While probably not authoritative, it did appear to be a reputable source, and the answer (0.08) does match the chart below the calculator. And, yes, I'm male so I used the male numbers; males tend to spend more time driving when multiple people travel together, in my no-scientific-at-all observations.
Now, I'm a light drinker even though I'm 200 pounds, so if I have more than one drink in an hour you won't find me driving for a while.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The absence of alcohol in one's system would preclude any positive reading of any alcohol during testing. Also, a 0.05% variance would, or should mean a variance in the end results. That doesn't mean that an actual 0.00 BAC would readout as 0.05 BAC. If it did, then the testing wouldn't be acceptable for use in legal proceedings.
http://blog.aacriminallaw.com/dwi/breathalyzer-101-fail-test-sober/
Not to mention
http://www.ladanlaw.com/how-accurate-are-breathalyzers-anyway.html
http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/DrivingIssues/1055505643.html
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
MADD is where it started before, too.
..don't panic
First, lets break down "an accident" into 3 major parts: 1)everything that happens till impact(driver's control of car, road conditions, condition of car when driver senses 'problem', etc) 2)what happens during impact, till 'state of rest'(metal bends, airbags, human bodies feel forces, etc) 3)what happens after SOR(EMT response, ER room docs, etc) Guess what? All the DUI stuff hasn't affected #1 to any measurable degree, which is why we don't hear MADD taking credit for lowering auto collision frequency or magnitude. Sure it is a complex and "moving target" because cars handle better but there are now more, but roads got a bit better, but now we also got hella immigrant drivers and used cars are cheaper, but some come off road due to smog check issues, etc, etc. But fact is MADD and DUI enforcement have not had a positive effect on their target....#1. What MADD (and police) do is take unearned credit for engineers (who tend to be DUIs) for massive improvements in #2, and for other scientists and MDs who have made some improvements in #3. This pretty easy to understand. Slower reflexes don't mean "unsafe"(human injury wise) driving. Faster, more hyped up reflexes do. Coffee more dangerous than beer. Are NASCAR drivers "good drivers"? Sure, among the best, but they crash all the time because they are in a hurry, and the crashes they cause are pretty sever with cars flipping into each other. The by far most common DUI 'crash' is mild 'rear ender' because he didn't brake in time, which with or without airbags is about as safe a crash as it gets. Also, a DUI will crash at far lower speed than sober, and they TEND to drive much slower. For every "wild man" DUI driver there are 1,000 "good citizens" just in a big hurry, or having fun with their semi-fast cars. I remember hearing "50% of all traffic deaths happen between 6 and 8 AM", not PM, which makes sense because that is when guys like me are doing 80 on surface streets and over 100 on hwy, rushing to get to work at distant job site, before rush hour slows us down. If "impaired" is the issue, I've got a much better idea.... Lets include a "reaction time/skills test" similar to one of those $3 (in 1980 USD no less) calculator watches with "games", and you need to get a certain score before it will start the car. This will be for EVERYONE and it will be SAME TEST, because we don't care if you have slow reflexes because you are 22yr old and drunk, or 55yr old divorced MADD member, or maybe just very tired.
it took out all my breaks.
But, based on the evidence from NHTSA itself, though, hard to argue for this on the evidence of any kind of dose-response curve:
% of fatalities involving
0% alcohol: 62%
.01 - .07% alcohol: 6%
.08% or more alcohol: 32% (including .15% or more alcohol: 21%. )
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/810985.pdf Table 4 .01 or higher who were involved in fatal crashes had BAC levels at or above .08, and 55 percent (7,974) had BAC levels at or above .15. The most frequently recorded BAC level among drinking drivers in fatal crashes was .16."
Holds for national figures and for what looks like every state.
"In 2007, 84 percent (12,068) of the 14,447 drivers with a BAC of
Note that this already skewed result is not corrected for number or drivers or miles driven. Given the relatively small percentage of drivers who are out there with .15% alcohol and the relatively small number of total miles driven which are driven at this level, this makes the real increased risk per mile or per driver even higher at this level. Fact is, when you think of it, if you have a blood alcohol of .15%, you're an unusual specimen to start with, and if you're trying to drive home that way, you're very unusual. That's six drinks in an hour for that hypothetical 160 pound man.
However, certainly nothing there suggests that dropping the limit to .05% will do anything at all. Consider this simple hypothetical normalization for frequency at lower alcohol vs no alcohol, since we don't have the total number or drivers and/or miles by alcohol level to get actual per capita or per mile risk: .08 or greater alcohol; these are clearly increased risk, but we want to differentiate between the 0 alcohol and .01 to .07 group: .08% alcohol, are in the 0% alcohol group, and 6/68, or 9% of drivers or miles with less than .08% alcohol, are associated with alcohol between .01 and .07; then normalizing the above fatality figures calculates that there would be 0 increased risk per mile or per capita associated with that level of alcohol. I don't know what the true percentage of drivers or miles by alcohol level is, but that approximate 9:1 split between no alcohol and .01-.07 alcohol seems in the ballpark to me. You'd have to come up with a much lower percentage for these (currently legal, note) slightly impaired drivers and/or miles driven to make any impact on the fact that the vast, vast majority of the risk in in the super-drunk ranks.
Exclude the group with
These two groups represent a total of 68% of fatalities. How does the ratio of fatalities between the two groups compare with a hypothetical ratio of miles driven or drivers between them?
If we guess that 62/68, or 91% of drivers or miles with less than
This isn't surprising, though. Previous studies didn't find that some minute amount of alcohol suddenly makes crashes and fatalities shoot up. It's not even vaguely proportional to alcohol level. What they found is that the bulk of crashes and fatalities are associated with a tiny fraction of drivers with very high blood alcohol. And, when they look at other parameters, these folks tend to have a whole parcel of antisocial and risky behavior; hyperaggression, depression, criminal convictions, history of violence, no driver's license, no insurance, no registration, dangerously unmaintained vehicles etc. Maybe the pathology causes the alcohol consumption; maybe the alcohol consumption causes the pathology; maybe both. Most people have heard the folk wisdom that some folks get aggressive when they're drunk, other folks get suicidal, etc. But the whole package is quite literally an accident looking for a place to happen.
And these other factors, co
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
a bit of a buzz definitely is a performance enhancing drug when playing video games
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Considering my past experience as a seventeen-year-old, I was a bad driver because I acted like a seventeen-year-old, not because I was new to driving.
I got my Ontario G1 (learners permit) when I was 16 years old. I drove with my parents in my high school parking lot a few times but never really got into it because my bicycle or public transportation could get me everywhere I wanted to be and cost me next to nothing. This license ended up expiring after 5 years, and I had to get it again because it was easier for ID than going through the hoops for an "age of majority card" so I could continue buying beer (age is 19 in Ontario). Three years after that - 24 years old, and now 8 years after I first got my learners - I finally learned to drive and upgraded my license through the required road test to being able to drive alone/unsupervised since this was a prerequisite for the girl I was after at the time. I've been driving ever since.
I don't know what it's like to be 17 and driving, but I have always felt like I skipped the insanity period. As much as I despise the insurance companies, I can fully understand why they charge more for younger drivers age-wise.
the mystery clears up; today's NYT has a graphic of the risk by alcohol level vs age; the .05 to .08% risk is mainly in younger drivers. as well as a lot of the 0 to .05% risk, too.
the online version also cuts it by time of day; would it be a surprise to see that alcohol related deaths at all ages tend to be around midnight, plus or minus a couple of hours?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.