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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."
Probably so that people that just washed their mouth with Listerine aren't driving illegally
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%.
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.
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.
So, right now, there's a huge negative stigma associated with getting a DUI. It's rare enough, and heinous enough, that society views it as a serious mistake.
If you reduce the BAC threshold enough, then getting a DUI will become so common that the negative social stigma will be gone, which will defeat the purpose of having the law to begin with.
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?
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.
If firearm and drunk driving fatalities only occurred to the people mishandling the firearm or drinking the alcohol, sure. Unfortunately they don't :-(
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.
...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
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.
The world certainly would be entirely safe from driving accidents if nobody was ever allowed to drive. 0% is physically impossible: alcohols are a broad class of naturally occurring organic chemicals, that will be present at some (tiny) level in any human body, even if you have never taken a drink in your life. If you want to permit anyone to drive, then you'll need to set a non-zero limit somewhere; preferably above natural fluctuations in baseline level and measurement error. So, where to set the level? Do you need to check whether the driver has consumed a drink in the last year? Week? Hour? Minute? Rather than setting a useless/impossible "0 is lowest, so it must be best" limit, one should look at *actually available data* to determine how alcohol levels correlate with actual increases in accidents.
P.S.: do you ever stay up an extra 10 minutes at night, to finish reading that book chapter / checking your favorite news site? If you do, do you avoid driving the next day, because you've *knowingly decreased your driving ability* by sleep deprivation? And, if you didn't know before, you do now --- so don't even think about stepping in a car if you've stayed up the least bit past your bedtime.
We need to do the same with sleeping pills, pain pills, lack of sleep, cell phones, paper reading material, makeup, cigarettes (you seen what happens when a driver drops a cigarette in their lap and it rolls down their groin?), caffeine (large amounts can cause lack of focus in some people), benzodiazepines, getting blow jobs from a passenger, people driving home after seeing a dentist in some cases...
Holy shit, I could do this all day...
kids in the car yelling, passengers talking, sign spinners, bill boards, radio advertisements, cops running radar, red light cameras, dashboard instrument panels with their flashing lights, wearing headphones while driving, radios and all the buttons you can fiddle with...
Outlaw them all. Why allow someone to knowingly decrease their ability to drive?
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.
Because there are lots of other things that impair your ability to drive: driving while tired, for instance. Should we not let people drive unless they've had enough sleep? At some point you have to let people make their own decisions.
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?
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.
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
What are you going to do? Turn the inside of a car into a sterile wasteland and ban every possible thing that might decrease someone's ability to drive by event the smallest amount? Hey, no radio, phone, GPS, and definitely no talking to the driver. No driving hungry, or after taking cold medication, or after a Red Bull. All of those things could impact your driving in some minor way.
It's a question of proportionality. There is a point of diminishing returns beyond which the effort required to prevent people from driving after drinking becomes absurd. We can't even successfully prevent all idiots from driving at .08, despite millions in enforcement and PR campaigns. Imagine the pointlessness of spending an order of magnitude more to also fail to stop people from having a beer with dinner.
There is a point at which alchol impairs your ability to drive a car to the extent that you are an unacceptable danger. That point may be .08 or it may be .05, but it's definitely not "anything above 0".
Life needs more saving throws.
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.
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:
Why allow someone to knowingly decrease their ability to drive?
If that were the case nobody would be driving.
- Got a bad grade on your final exam? You might be angry and drive less safely. Criminal!
- Found out your girlfriend is cheating on you and you drive away? You are not emotionally stable enough to drive. Off to jail you go!
- "Oh man! The new Whatevergame Expansion is finally out! I'll go grab it now omgomg!" You are too excited and not in your normal mental state and should not drive.
- No radios in cars and no talking to passengers. Listening to the radio or talking to people means a part of you is not paying attention to the road. You could be driving in a safer manner but you are not. You just lost your license to drive a car.
- No advertizements on the side of the highways. You are either looking at the road or at the advertizements. This is not safe. Hand over your license and your car will be impounded.
- You're been driving for three hours / need to go pee / are hungry or thirsty / bored == you are not driving as safely as you should be.
- Etc, etc
As a society we acknowledge that it is not reasonably possible for individuals to drive in the safest manner all the time. There are two options:
(1) Nobody should drive, or
(2) We acknowledge the fact that humans are imperfect and we put laws to mitigate the damage done by factors which decrease our ability to drive. This is why you can listen to radio/music but not talk/text on your cellphone, you can drive after a long and tiresome day's work to go back home, you can drink a glass of wine or a beer (but not a dozen) at a friend's house and drive back home, etc. I think most people believe this to be the optimal solution.
We have to draw the line somewhere. And I think that both a BAC of 0.00 or a BAC of 1.00+ is not where that line should be reasonably drawn.
GeeZ!!!
Lowering it to the .08 was too LOW to begin with.....
You can blow .08 and not be too impaired to drive...
Good Lord, are we going to let MADD start us back on the road to prohibition next???
But, more to the point the OP was making. Depends on the state you live in.
I asked a lawyer in my state what to do if pulled over after having a few. He said if you know you're at the limit, don't say a damned thing and put your hands out for the cuffs and go quietly. Refuse tests, don't do field sobriety test (that is NOTHING more than evidence gathering). At worst for first offense you'll get reckless driving and maybe suspended license of which you can get permits to drive to work for food, etc.
Tough yes, but better than a DWI on your record.
Like with anything dealing with the cops, first thing to do is shut up, and lawyer up.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Or people with certain types of diabetes that generate natural blood alcohol.
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.
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.)
And the key word there is "Associated".
Do you know what kind of depravity Dihydrogen monoxide exposure has been "associated" with?
- Nearly 100% of all felons were exposed to Dihydrogen Monoxide within just hours prior to their arrest.
- DHMO use is almost universal amongst child rapists.
- DHMO exposure actually kills children
- DHMO is dangerously addictive, killing most addicts who attempt to abstain from it within just 3 days!
Hows that for association?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Diminishing returns for increased cost. Arresting people who are drunk and swerving around the road is good: that increases safety at a fair tradeoff of tax money and personal freedom. Arresting people who have had a beer at dinner and whose driving skills have only marginally decreased is bad: that would likely increase safety very little (though studies would be needed to be sure one way or the other) at a huge increase in cost of enforcement and a huge loss of personal freedom.
I agree with this. As much as I'm all for legalizing every drug under the sun, that freedom must come with responsibility, including internalizing all of the risks. If you operate heavy machinery in a factory, chances are they require you to have a 0.0% BAC on the job. Why should it be any different for machinery that actually moves around in public, in a system where driver's licenses are handed out like candy with no serious training standards?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
HELL
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Last three times I almost had an accident was because of a buxom woman in either a low top or shorts. So add that to the list.
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.
It's the Golden Rule
He who has the gold, rules.
If states could live within their means and didn't need Federal money they could do whatever the Hell they wanted (sort of, no nuclear weapons or suchlike).
You let them in, they own the house.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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".
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.
So will total prohibition. Neither is acceptable. Drunk driving is deadly, but this is a step too far when even the government admits a limit this low this is de facto prohibition. Unless we also want to outlaw other distractions, like screens, radios, cupholders, pets, and passengers, we're just choosing what rights we're OK with giving up.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
We can't even successfully prevent all idiots from driving at .08
I'm not a professional researcher, but I question their results. I read a different article which said that .05 BAC levels would save 200-300 lives a year. .05 is 38% over sober .08 169%
Some figures:
Annual traffic deaths: ~33k
Portion that are 'alcohol related': 1/3rd, about 10k total
Number of lives estimated to be saved: 500-800 per year, 5-8% of current alcohol deaths.
Extra risk:
Already there's all sorts of activities that will raise the risk of you having an accident more than 38%. The vast majority of the fatal DUI accidents I've read about are for people with BACs north of .24, or triple the current limit.
Meanwhile, I predict that prosecuting people for .05 DUIs is going to be expensive. Most will try to fight it; you're getting into the range where a breath test might not be accurate enough. I question whether the the cost to society for enforcing the rule might not exceed the cost of implementing it.
Realistically you'd be better off somehow stopping the 'should be dead with a BAC that high' people from driving. A bit tough given how creative some of them get - permanently 'borrowing' a friend or relative's vehicle, secretly buying a used car without the mandated interlock, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
At first, I thought you were bluffing or just misinformed. A quick consultation with the oracle (No, not that Oracle) indicates you are correct. Except that the levels are too low to interfere with quantitative testing and legal proceedings. Don't try this excuse without consulting appropriate counsel.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
There is significant literature from EU authorities (and each of the member states local DOT).
Bottom line is:
* 0.08 is the last "safe" limit. Performance is already decreased, but It is approximately equivalent to driving with children in the backseat. Not the best, but acceptable risk. About twice as bad as 0.05.
* However, above 0.08, performance decrease sternly and exponentially. At 0.1, chances of death or dismemberment become alarmingly hight. It is not obvious for a driver to make the distinction between 0.08 "happy" and 0.1 "drunk", since one may not feel impaired, but he is, really.
* Anything over 0.12 is classical "drunk driving" as understood by common folks. Chances of accidents are extremely elevated.
* 0.05 is the bottom of the exponential curve. There are still benefits from driving with a lower BAC, but the lions share of the exponential decrease is passed. The difference with 0.08 is significant (half less chances of accident, or more, more pronounced for young drivers). Below that, chances of accident continue to decrease, but not as quickly, so there is little benefits to be reaped going even lower.
Another interesting point is that effect of BAC on drivers is very age related. Being drunk at 0.1 when you are an experienced driver in your 30's puts you back at the same risk as when you were 16 and road racing everywhere and everyone (this is bad, indeed). However, a teen driver at 0.08 is already at extreme risk (as if he was an experienced driver at 1.4 or more from my memory), the statistics I read just showed this result, but didn't explained why. Could be that most 30+ have acquired some sort of higher alcohol resistance, or that it requires more focus from teen drivers, focus that cannot be achieved when intoxicated, even mildly. Anyway, teens that consume alcohol should never drive, even at legal concentrations.
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.
The states really don't have much choice in taking federal money. Because the federal tax rate is so high, there's a limit to how much a state can tax before their taxable residents and businesses move elsewhere. The feds know this, so they tax more and offer the states the money back in exchange for the forfeiture of their 10th amendment rights. As long as 1 state keeps taxes low with federal money, no state can refuse the cash and keep its tax base.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
WTF?!? Purell is probably the most common hand cleanser in the US and it is 62% ethanol (ethyl alcohol) according to the manufacturer's website. Or are you claiming that the evil American empire has forced other countries to act according to the stupidity you have written.
What a load of crap you have spewed.
Anyone who drinks regularly is like not that impaired at those levels. If I am as impaired at 0.1 as you are are at 0.05 why can I not drive at 0.1?
What about the old bat that is more impaired than either of us to do age?
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.
Anyone who drinks regularly is like not that impaired at those levels.
Well, they probably are similarly impaired --- they're just more used to the condition. And if they're correspondingly more cocky about how well they handle their liquor, they'll just be that much less reluctant to head out on the road and murder a bunch of folks. Just because you can hold down a bunch more vodka shots without puking, and have developed mental coping strategies to not seem like a total klutz when you walk or speak, doesn't mean you aren't still quite impaired (without knowing it).
What about the old bat that is more impaired than either of us to do age?
Well, one could work towards increasing availability of public transportation and services for the elderly/disabled. One might even be more accepting of involuntary impairments (getting old), versus voluntary impairments (chugging a few beers soon before driving) --- realizing that banning an elderly person without preexisting access to suitable transportation alternatives from driving at all is likely a far greater hardship to them than insisting that the young and healthy pick a designated driver or arrange their drinking needs not to immediately precede their driving needs.
My fantasy is to see a law that says a) all fines, confiscations, etc. go to the general fund, not any law enforcement agency, and b) the tax rates for year N+1 have to be adjusted down so that the net revenue collected from fines in year N is zero. That way maybe they'd be more inclined to enforce the law for the sake of public safety instead of revenue.
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
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.
The idea that you're "not that impaired" is a fancy in your head with no basis in objective measurements. You get used to the side effects and you somewhat compensate for them in your gross behavior, but the low-level stuff like reaction times and visual/oculomotor responses do not show any appreciable effects of alcohol tolerance.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
There are many things that can impair driving. Kids fighting, dog puking, sun shining in your eyes, messing with the radio, and that's just off the top of my head. Who gives a shit if you can detect small changes in eye movement? Is that going to kill anybody? No? Then stop trying to push Prohibition back down our throats.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Only if the punishment is a spanking from the victim.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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.
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.
How can this be modded insightful. 100 countries have adopted 0.05 due to the carnage caused by drunk drivers.
Because insight requires a little more thought than "50,000 frenchmen can't be wrong". Try doing an actual risk benefit analysis. How many additional people will we imprison by moving to 0.05 per year? What are the social costs of that? Is it more or less than the cost of losing 800 people a year? Are there ways we could save 800 people per year that cost less? Do those first.
This is the kind of reasoning that needs to go into an insightful comment on the issue. As it is, I doubt anyone has done this.
On second thought, this is the country that thinks so little of mass shootings in schools that they refuse to regulate the access to firearms. Deaths on the road due to drunk drivers is nothing when compared to that.
Actually, mass shootings kill less than 100 people per year. If the NTSB is to be believed, lowering the BAC limit to .05 would save eight times as many lives as if we eliminated all mass shootings in the US. But I'm not sure I believe the NTSB.
But you're right, we do think so little of mass shootings that we refuse to regulate the access to firearms. And we are absolutely correct to do so. 100 deaths per year in a country of 300 million is negligable. You'll save orders of magnitude more lives if you regulate fructose instead of guns.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
And just for the record, the best known worms killer is alcohol, which explains why the regular american is so fat and full with worms...the intestinal worms....
So you think washing your mouth with alcohol will kill off worms in your intestines? They don't teach a lot of anatomy where you're from, do they?
In 2011, 31,000 people died firearm-related deaths.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_gun_deaths_are_in_the_US_every_year
In 2010, there were 10,000 deaths due to drunk driving, and that number is falling.
http://www.centurycouncil.org/drunk-driving/drunk-driving-fatalities-national-statistics
More crap and bullshit from the anti-gun-control crowd.
Oh I see, you're supposed to get the alcohol in from the other end?
In Australia we have a 0.05 limit on BAC plus a 0 limit on provisional (usually under 21) drivers. 0.08 is the point where you are obviously going to fail at driving. 0.05 is where you think you can do it but more likely than not cannot.
After seeing how friends dealt with the 0 limit on provisional drivers and in light of the fact I don't drive myself, I'd support a 0 limit - it encourages a lot of caution and forethought, particularly the morning after when you can still be drunk and might think it's just a hangover.
Your long list of examples omit something important: data. Those examples simply don't have enough impact to trigger laws. You might not like them, but laws like this aren't written to accommodate your dislikes, laws like this are based on data. If putting on make-up was a significant source of accidents, above DWI or cell-phone usage, it would be on the list. It isn't arbitrary that alcohol and cell phone usage are restricted, they cause the most accidents.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Maybe were you live. Some places are so severely restrictive that even such a simple request will arouse suspicion.
In fact, where I live, it's actually a *criminal offense* to refuse an officer's demand for a chemical sobriety test (breathalyzer or blood test). Yes, they can legally compel you, even if they know they're full of shit. Simply saying "no" will get you in cuffs and in jail. We have check stops here too, usually during holidays when it's common to go out for drinks, where they stop *everyone* going through a certain point.
And nobody dared protesting it when the a law was changed in this way because, well, that would be supporting drunk driving, of course!
No, the government, as usual, took one or two rare freak examples as an excuse to cash more of our rights in for more bad laws. Bad examples make for bad policy.
The wiki answer is from the CDC.
The century council number is from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Those not authoritative enough for you?
Any personal tragedy is personal to you. To everyone else it's a statistic. I think we all know we can't make everyone 100 percent safe. We make choices based on different factors and only one of them is safety.
The BAC was reduced last year from 0.08 to 0.05. in our province. It did not lead to a huge rise in BAC convictions, nor it did not lead to any lessening of the social stigma associated with drunk driving. What it did is make our roads safer.
Anarchists never rule
Nop, You are making a conversion error (it is expressed in g/L in most places, equivalent to 10BAC). Most of Europe is between 0.05 BAC and 0.03 BAC. Many countries are at statutory 0, not sure how that is enforced in practice (since natural BAC is often in the 0.01 range).
Reducing the BAC to 0.05 and implementing random breath testing has been very effective in reducing road deaths. We reduced the BAC limit to 0.05 in the 90's and this is why Australia has 5.7 deaths per 100,000 people (8 per 100,000 vehicles) and the US has 12.7 deaths per 100,000 people (15 per 100,000 vehicles). Because it sure as shit isn't because Australian's can drive.
Meanwhile, I predict that prosecuting people for .05 DUIs is going to be expensive. Most will try to fight it; you're getting into the range where a breath test might not be accurate enough. I question whether the the cost to society for enforcing the rule might not exceed the cost of implementing it.
The answer to this is simple.
First, offer all people caught with a DUI a blood test. Breathalysers can be inaccurate if not configured correctly (but they are accurate if configured correctly) however a blood test eliminates this problem. Breathalysers often show a lower BAC than a blood test would so if you get caught DUI by a breathalyser and are pissed _DO NOT_ opt for the blood test as it is likely to show a higher BAC.
Second, increase fines and suspensions for DUI to pay for it.
Third, loser pays. If you fight a DUI and lose, you get an extra fine.
In recent years, Australian courts have ordered the installation of Alcohol (Ignition) Interlock Devices into cars driven by people with multiple high range DUI convictions. Personally I'd rather these people have their licenses torn up for life and their cars auctioned off, but that's just me.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Way to cherry pick your data!
You use the term "gun deaths," meaning suicides, accidents (at 25-year lows), lawful homicide (ie, death by cop), lawful self defense, criminal on criminal homicide, and then finally at the end, the only one we're actually worried about as a society, bad guys killing good guys (and by the way, that one is at an almost 40-year low).
Then you define "alcohol deaths" as narrowly as possible: only those involving drunk driving. No mention of cirrhosis of the liver, alcohol poisoning, alcohol impairment accidents, alcohol related violence, or anything else.
More crap and bullshit, eh?
Taking your alcohol that way will not give you a BAC around zero, because your BAC results from alcohol vaporisation in your lungs.
On the upside, alcohol taken that way will get you much more drunk.
By the same logic, we should ban sound systems in cars and require all cellular phones to be placed in a Faraday cage. Children of all ages should likewise be in a soundproof compartment separated from the driver. Well, actually, that last one would probably be pretty popular.
"But you're right, we do think so little of mass shootings that we refuse to regulate the access to firearms."
It's disingenuous of you to focus on 100 deaths when gun regulation would affect all gun deaths, not just mass shootings. It would probably affect mass shootings less than other gun deaths. There are a hell of a lot more than 100 gun deaths per year, plus much more still carnage wrought short of death.
Nevertheless you are totally right about the cost-benefit analysis, notwithstanding being wrong about the costs of widespread gun ownership.
I'm not an ocular neuroscientist, but I'm not exactly a stranger to eye motion or being drunk. Just because there is a detectable effect does not mean that that effect justifies criminal sanction.
We reduced the BAC limit to 0.05 in the 90's and this is why Australia has 5.7 deaths per 100,000 people (8 per 100,000 vehicles) and the US has 12.7 deaths per 100,000 people (15 per 100,000 vehicles). Because it sure as shit isn't because Australian's can drive.
Actually, the USA is at 10.4 as of 2011, and 1.1 per 100 million vmt, which works out to 6.8 per billion km.
Your death toll of 5.71 per 100k (2011 data), and 5.8 per billion km.
Results: You're still safer than we are even by distance driven, but we drive a HECK of a lot more per person. In addition, given that the proposal is, high end, expected to save ~8% of alcohol related deaths, which is in turn only 1/3rd of total deaths - that's about a 3% cut in death rate. That would drop us from 10.4 to 10.1 per 100k, and from 6.8 to 6.6 per billion km. Better, but still far short of your own.
For that matter, let's assume we ELIMINATE all alcohol related fatalities. That's 1/3rd of our deaths gone. That would get us down to about 6.9 per 100k people, still above your figure, and 4.5 per billion km, finally below your own. You're 15% safer per km driven, btw.
Conclusion: We have problems, and it's not all attributable to alcohol. Reducing the BAC allowed would help a little, perhaps. But it's edging into territory where treating driving as a privilege, and not a right, and getting marginal people out of the driver's seat would be beneficial. For that matter, getting tougher with driver's ed would help.
The answer to this is simple.
1. Offering a blood test doesn't alter the odds they will attempt to contest it in court.
2. Increasing 'fines and suspensions' doesn't cut it. Already you have the problem where we end up tossing convicts in jail because they can't pay their fines, and suspensions often don't do a thing here because the main result is they simply drive on a suspended/revoked license. Or get a waiver for 'work purposes'. Or they lose their job, making it even more unlikely that they'll be able to pay your increased fines.
3. Same problem as #2. They often simply don't have the money, and we already have your 'loser pays' system, more so than MOST countries. You think the lawyer to contest your DUI is free? Paid for by the defendant. Remember plea bargains? The USA is king of those. 90% of people end up pleading out for reduced sentences. But, raise the fines - oops, they're MORE likely to fight, because, well, they're bankrupt anyway if they plead! If you arrange such a generous plea bargain, then the legal hawks sit there and say you're suppressing justice because you're making it cheaper to simply plead guilty.
In recent years, Australian courts have ordered the installation of Alcohol (Ignition) Interlock Devices into cars driven by people with multiple high range DUI convictions. Personally I'd rather these people have their licenses torn up for life and their cars auctioned off, but that's just me.
That's fine. In my state you get one for the first DUI, no matter the range. Were you aware that many US States have required them for decades, even for the first? From what I'm seeing, in all the states I've checked you're getting it period for the 2nd, no 'high range' required.
I'm not saying that we don't have problems. What I'm saying is that reducing the BAC level isn't going to help much, which I backed up with some math and 3 citations. We need to do more to stop the HIGH BAC drivers - when they're driving at .24 and up, triple the current legal limit, making it so they're 5X the legal limit isn't going to change much.
Heck, given that the human psyche is often more affected by the certainty of punishment over the severity of it, a hand slap and $50 fine would probably be sufficient to stop 99% of drunk dri
I don't read AC A human right
you better not eat any fresh donuts or bread before driving
Or fruit.
Actually it's worse than you claim. Natural yeasts will start fermentation in almost everything, so actually almost all food has trace amounts of alchohol.
I do, however support "very low", i.e. 0 to the precision of the legislated equipment, meaning below 0.001 or whatever. I just don't like bad science.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Although mass shootings get all the headlines, controlling access to firearms will save a whole lot more than 100 lives per year. Most of the savings will come from reduced accidental deaths and suicides.
There is a widespread belief that having a gun in the house makes you safer: this is not true.
(other sources along those lines)
There is also a widespread belief a person who dies from suicide would have done so no matter what method: this also is not true. Most suicide attempts are impulsive acts, and most are unsuccessful. An impulse act with pills or slit wrists is unlikely to succeed: it takes time, the person may have second thoughts, and usually recovers through medical and psychological treatment. A suicide attempt by a gun is much, much more likely to succeed. If that suicidal person did not have ready access to a gun, and had to resort to a different method, the changes are good that most (i.e., more than 50%) of those people would still be with us today.
The Kellerman study has been thoroughly discredited from many angles, including the fact that it used neighborhoods with high criminal populations, and counted rival gangs as someone you know. It even counted, for example, if you had a gun in the house, never used, and a rival gang-banger of your son's came in and shot somebody. Your gun had nothing to do with the violence, but it's counted towards Kellerman's total. On the other hand, if you pointed a gun at the bad guy and he fled, that was not counted as defensive gun use. There are many other problems with the study. It would take a whole article to detail them all.
Kellerman's study was also not formally peer-reviewed, and he still refuses to provide the raw data for outside analysis.
Other studies show between 100,000 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, far outnumbering gun deaths even counting suicide.
Japan has far more suicides, yet no guns. Explain. And, in a free society, who are we to legislate that someone can't kill himself by his desired means as long as he doesn't injure another in the process?
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!!
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