| When Roger Sterling takes a glass of vodka "for the road" on the television drama Mad Men, we laugh it off as another bit of black comedy. We're smirking on our couches, nervously, from the reckless, carte blanche behavior seen on the show's fictional 1960s setting. But five decades on, despite hundreds of laws on the books, drunk driving is still a very real problem. This week, the National Transportation Safety Board—the federal agency that investigates deadly air and road crashes—proposed lowering the legal blood-alcohol-content threshold from 0.08 percent to 0.05. And while many governors, restaurants, and even the acclaimed Mothers Against Drunk Driving are against it, we're inclined—as professionals who drive cars for a living—to support tougher drunk-driving laws. Most European countries, Australia, and even South Africa rely on a 0.05 limit. In Sweden, which has a 0.02-percent limit, we're told people don't even order wine if they know they'll be driving home after dinner. In the U.S., it took two decades to get every state to a 0.08 standard, so no one is betting a lower limit will take effect anytime soon. When the breathalyzer was invented in 1953, it marked the first time police could prove a driver's intoxication with actual numbers. But in that post-War era, when chain smoking ruled and seatbelts didn't exist, drunk driving wasn't considered a public-safety issue, let alone a social problem. By the early 1980s, when MADD and other awareness groups began pressuring the government for tougher alcohol laws, many states allowed a 0.15-percent limit. Ask any baby boomer what the bar scene was like back then and you'll discover everyone, even your parents, were all mad. While sports fans, concertgoers, stadium owners, liquor distributors, and anyone serving and consuming alcohol in public will be sounding off, we see no point arguing against a stricter national law, even if the NTSB admits it may only save a few hundred lives a year. Alcohol accounts for nearly a third of all U.S. traffic deaths and 146,000 injuries every year. But while drunk driving fatalities have dropped sharply since the early '80s, the death rate has kept flat between 30 and 32 percent since 1995. As a society, we shouldn't accept that as "good enough." And, if we're honest with ourselves, cutting back on one or two drinks while we're out isn't an unreasonable way to get there.
But we're not in favor of the NTSB's suggesting mandatory breath testing at every traffic stop, nor are we with MADD on installing alcohol-sensing devices in every new car. We also wonder why driving stoned isn't taken seriously, if at all (Colorado, where marijuana has become legal, has pending legislation that would set a THC blood limit for pot-smoking drivers). In any case, there's no need to scrap personal responsibility and freedom in exchange for smarter police enforcement and harsher punishments on DUI offenders. We can and should have both. After all, you're risking your life—and everyone else's—each time you start your engine.  from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | |||
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