In Florida, you are not required to wear a helmet on a motorcycle if you pay for $10,000 in insurance. That won’t even pay for the chopper ride to the hospital. ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
$50 annual membership gets you unlimited chopper rides in these parts.
SShh! Don’t tell the motorcyclists. They are our major source of organ donations (“Donor-Cycles”)
Don’t I know it…mom was a single lung transplant recipient back in '94. Donor was a rider of a Harley.
Nothing changed in Norway. The Norwegians that I know hate the law. If they are driving, they can’t even have a single drink with dinner at a restaurant. And the enforcement / penalties are so draconian that no one dares push it – they won’t even drive to work the next morning, after drinking the night before.
One Surgeon sick of dealing with road trauma caused the change in Australia.
from http://blogs.theage.com.au/business/lindsaytanner/2009/05/26/tributetoare.html
Gordon Trinca was chairman of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons’ road trauma committee from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. He played a leading role in the campaign that produced .05 laws; random breath-testing; and compulsory seat beat legislation. Along with other key players like police surgeon John Birrell, Tricia helped make Victoria close to the leading jurisdiction in the world on road safety.
Road trauma was so prevalent 40 years ago that the Melbourne Sun ran a ‘Declare War on 1034’ campaign in 1970 as there were 1034 road deaths in one year. Now the number is less than a third of that, in spite of the enormous increase in vehicles and road usage. Numerous European countries have failed to follow Victoria’s example, and continue to suffer much higher road deaths as a result.
On December 22 1970, Victoria enacted compulsory wearing of seat belts, just in time for the Christmas peak traffic period.
The effect on road trauma was so great – the death toll was down by almost 10 per cent in the first year – that all other Australian states followed and by January 1, 1972 the wearing of belts was compulsory throughout Australia. Other countries also introduced similar laws.
Of course air bags, electronic driver assist systems etc. make driving safer these days as well but look at the statistics:
1970: 1034 Deaths
…
2011: 287
2012: 282
2013: 90 (year to date)
Anthony.
While I’m happy to hear traffic fatalities have declined over the years in Australia, nothing that you showed there suggests how much, if at all, it has to do with the .05% BAC limit. Between 1970/1972 and today, traffic deaths in Australia have steadily declined at a pretty constant and gradual rate over that time.
If it were mostly because of that law, you would expect to see a much sharper decline followed by a leveling off. Plus, common sense tells that the seat belt portion of the law would have had a far greater effect on traffic deaths than DUI enforcement and the lowness of that legal limit. The steady decline over 40 years suggests that the other things you describe, the things that have been gradually changing over the last 40 years (mostly car safety technology) is playing the biggest role.
Same thing in the US, there were 26 deaths per 100,000 Americans on the roads in 1972, and about 10 deaths per 100,000 last year. The drop is even greater when you consider the deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled – that has dropped to about 25% of the level in 1972. If you look at the year-by-year, you won’t see any particular spike to the wave of MADD era laws in the 70s and 80s which dropped the DUI limit from .15% to .10% coupled with much more aggressive enforcement and punishment, and especially not to the drop from .10% to .08% in the early 2000s.
We all know correlation does not imply causality, and a closer look at the data do not seem to indicate that the downward push on DUI legal limits is responsible for these large, long-term declines in the danger of driving.
in June 2011 I was pulled over turning into my Northern VA neighborhood for too dark of tint on my car. I’d been at dinner and had a few Blue Moons, but not a crazy amount. Those beers smell as it turns out. I stopped in front of a neighbor’s house not more than 50 yards from my house. The cop measured my tint (and it was definitely too dark) and then he said he smelled alcohol and asked me to get out. Had to do all the stupid sobriety tests and blow in the breathalyzer. Blew a 0.03. Not even close. Getting into the car that night, I definitely felt like I was okay, but even the fact that I wasn’t close to the 0.08, it was a massive wake up call. Now if I go to HH after work, I’ll have a beer, maaaaybe two. Fortunately I now live in DC and can cab or walk everywhere so I have no concern about a DUI once I’m actually back in the city. But I think that, and the fact that my recent ex got a DUI in VA with a 0.15-0.20 BAC, scared me totally straight. I don’t want the stigma, nor the fines, etc that come along with it. Sadly, I think that’s what most people think of rather than the fact that they could hurt or even kill themselves or someone else. So my take away is that if the BAC gets lowered to 0.05, so be it. I’ll adjust accordingly. I’m fine with not having anything to drink if I know I’m going to drive. It’s simply just not worth any of the consequences.
I currently have no concerns about drinking two beers, glasses of wine or cocktails any time I go out. I know my limit and have never felt two drinks have caused me any level of impairment. However if the .05% limit were to be enacted, I would have to limit myself to one beer/cocktail/glass of wine any time I go out. That would result in fewer sales from the establishments I patronize and I would never again purchase a whole bottle of wine from a list or pay corkage for a 750ml bottle from my cellar if sharing a single bottle could potentially cause me or my wife to exceed a .05 bac when just the two of us go out. A single bottle of wine would have to be saved for a group of four or more. Hell, I may not even be able to enjoy a single pint of beer away from home if it’s over 7%abv. My personal opinion is .08 is entirely reasonable, .05 is ridiculously low.
Anthony, thank you. I suspected that the social change was driven (so to speak) by some measure of appreciation by the the body (so to speak) politic that the consequences were unacceptable.
If four drinks in an hour doesn’t put an average size male over 0.08, then that BAC number is on the high side. That’s pretty much the start of a binge, not the precursor to driving.
If I drink half a bottle of wine–three drinks–over 2-3 hours I would not feel sober enough to drive. But under current laws I’d probably be below the legal limit, perhaps significantly so. In that context 0.05 makes sense to me.
My only moderate objection is that there are many more dangerous behaviors on the road that either are not illegal or are not enforced. Alcohol causes drivers to lose focus. So do distractions like radios, TVs, phones, passengers. And then there are certain elderly and uninsured drivers who for different reasons shouldn’t be on the road.
If the motivation is to make the roads safer, then taking people who drive like > 0.08 BAC when sober off the road is a higher priority than lowering the BAC for alcohol-induced impairment to 0.05. Since BAC is measurable, it’s sort of the low hanging fruit, I guess.
All the online BAC charts dangerously underestimate the oomph of a standard “drink” of wine because they assume as little as 11.5% alcohol. For Christ’s sake how many centuries has it been since that’s been typical? If one assumes a “drink” is 0.5 oz of alcohol (and not all sources even seem to agree on that), a typical 14% alcohol bottle of wine will have 7, not 5 drinks, and they will be 3.5, not 5, ounces each.
4 of those drinks, a little over a half a bottle, in a hour with little food makes it very obvious to me that I can’t drive, and according to the charts that should put me at 0.09 BAC. A whole bottle in an hour with little food and it’s real hard to walk; anyone who chooses to drive at that point is a clear and present danger to society. Now 0.05 BAC, that’s an interesting number. Two drinks will apparently put me at 0.05 BAC. Tomorrow night I’ll drink exactly that in an hour and see if that’s a state I can obviously recognize as beyond the limit for safe driving. I will guess that it will be difficult to tell. (No, I won’t actually go out and drive afterward.)
All of this about how many “drinks” one can have in an hour seems very speculative, and absent some research with a breathalizer (I knew a friend once who picked one up via Skymall, but even then I would wonder about the accuracy and calibration, as I Know police check theirs monthly) I wouldn’t rely on that. Those who say they “know” that they can have that many drinks probably don’t “know” even if they are confident. I had always heard the logic that one drink an hour for a grown man was safe. I personally would be wary of two, but that is me and I’m not a huge guy by any means. Of course, two in the first hour is different than two an hour for several hours as well. In reality I’d guess that I could have two in an hour and hover around .05, but after that I’d probably want to drop off that pace.
Chris Seiber, I don’t know that I agree with your logic re. AUS. To suggest that changing the law would result in a steep decline is not necessarily true. It can take a long time to change society’s behaviors, even through the use of laws and their associated penalties. We have no idea of how widely the message was dissemenated, what the penalty structure was like, how adequate enforcement was for the population, and even less insight into what the general 1970 Australian attitudes towards following the laws generally or this law particularly were at that time. I suspect that a legal measure such as this, enacted in 1970 for the first time, would take a good deal of time to actually change behaviors, and that the curve would be smoother than you suggest.
Again, I feel that I am defending this law, and that funny because my first reaction was “oh sh*t, this” but I’ve made myself consider it from all angles and have come to see it as an attempt to influence a nuanced problem that is hard to solve. I still say that the societal cost of this measure should be considered though, and I still lean towards the idea that probably the total cost of this measure outweighs the benefit, even if that seems callous when measured in lives.
One thing that underlies all of this is that the result of such measures is a less social, less congenial, less familial society. We force imbibing into the home and away from the public space. In doing so people just go out to eat and drink less, and when they do go out they do so for shorter times. It helps demonize alcohol, and I suspect, to increase the non-driving dangers of alcohol - addiction, violence, etc. It discourages people to go out and spend time together and has an overall fractuous effect on the fabric of our communities. Of course, those points are moot if you live in a more traditional, urban or town setting, and thus it could be argued (correctly I’d think) that it was the dependence on the car and the spacing of our suburbs in general that fracture society, not laws designed to make travel amongst far-flung residences safer. Either way, the effect is the same.
As someone in the Alcohol business, I find the fear of the enforcement of the current law to be way out of line with the fact of it.
In order for me to sell wine, in a small town retail setting, you generally have to taste it, and we pour tiny little tastes, and have dump buckets prominently displayed, yet we have people every single day afraid to taste, even though they are walking (I’m on the downtown square in Healdsburg). Also, (I know it sounds crazy) but people won’t even WALK next door into the police station, to use the public restroom, after wine tasting, in fear. I hear this EVERY DAY.
A case can be made that this might help my retail business, since I’m in a walking zone, near other tasting rooms, that can be walked to, but overall I think the criminalization of more and more things, in the name of safety and security is reaching some kind of tipping point where it’s not just bad for business (and jobs) in general, but as a citizen, onerous and interfering with my pursuit of happiness.
At the risk of “reductio ad absurdum”, wouldn’t it be safer to never leave your home?
One of the difficulties in using numbers and statistics to project traffic deaths due to DUI at various levels of BAC is the enormous number of OTHER factors that apply. In particular, today’s cars are generally much “safer” in accidents than vehicles 15-20 years ago (better seat belts, air bags, frame construction, etc.). In addition, vehicle use seems to fluctuate based on factors such as the state of the economy and the price of fuel. So comparing deaths/injuries in a high vehicle usage year to those in a lower vehicle usage year can be misleading.
This isn’t to say the DUI and BAC levels are irrelevant; it’s just a problem of singling out one variable from many.
Bruce
Very thoughtful post, Michael P. You’re right that many of these purportedly health/public safety measures have a corrosive effect on our communal life – as another example, the extremity of the smoking bans have forced more smokers to become isolated in their homes, and I’m sure many people applaud that, but I think it’s at least one significant factor to the overall policy issue, yet one that probably received little to no consideration.
It’s been a pretty enlightened discussion here overall from all sides, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising.
Not in Indiana!