Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Page B

get in a car with someone else doing it. And he took away friends’ car keys so they wouldn’t do it. In keeping with his policy, Shaggy was walking home along the shoulder of Louisiana Highway 58 when a Toyota Camry driven by an alleged drunk driver struck and killed him. The fifty-three-year-old driver, from the same town as the conscientious entertainer, was charged with vehicular homicide.
    Drunken driving, despite decades of tougher laws, police crackdowns, random checkpoints, and public awareness campaigns, remains the number one cause of traffic deaths. This runs counter to the widespread perception that public attitudes have turned sharply in recent years against driving drunk (after a long history of lax enforcement), so much so that the term “designated driver” has become a part of the everyday lexicon. Yet the statistics that document DWI carnage have stubbornly refused to budge in recent years. Ken Kolosh at the National Safety Council calls it “this brick wall we’ve hit” and identifies it as one of the main obstacles to reducing the car crash death toll going forward.
    Consider these gruesome statistics:
    â€¢    The average drunk driver has driven drunk eighty times before his or her first arrest.
    â€¢    Every two minutes a person is injured in a drunk-driving crash.
    â€¢    Costs directly associated with drunk driving in the U.S. are $200 billion a year.
    â€¢    One-third of drivers arrested for drunk driving are repeat offenders.
    â€¢    The age group most likely to drive drunk is twenty-one to twenty-five (nearly a fourth of all cases).
    â€¢    On weekends, 31 percent of all fatal crashes involve alcohol. On weekdays, drunk driving is a factor in less than half that amount (15 percent of all fatal crashes).
    â€¢    Men are twice as likely to drive drunk as women.
    â€¢    More than 29 million people admitted to driving under the influence of alcohol in 2012—more than the population of Texas.
    â€¢    The lifetime odds of being involved in a drunk-driving crash are two out of three. 33
    It is true that the number of drunk-driving fatalities has fallen dramatically since their high point in the seventies, when more than 60 percent of all traffic deaths involved alcohol. Since those days, when traffic deaths from all causes peaked at 54,589, several major changes in car design and the legal drinking age combined to bring that number down.
    A spike in alcohol-related crashes occurred in the seventies after many states lowered the legal drinking age to eighteen. The trend reversed after the ages were raised again in the eighties and nineties, driven in part by the lobbying and publicawareness campaigns by the Mothers Against Drunk Driving organization.
    Separately, a 1968 federal law 34 mandating seat belts in all vehicles except buses and, later, state laws requiring people to actually wear them or face stiff fines, reduced traffic deaths (though not traffic crashes) dramatically. So did subsequent collision safeguards: air bags and more crashworthy car frames and bodies. Other technologies actually prevented crashes by compensating for human error, such as antilock braking systems that became commonplace in the late eighties, lowering the risk of fatal multivehicle collisions by 18 percent and run-off-the-road fatalities (particularly loss of control on curves) by 35 percent. All of which meant that crashes, drunken or otherwise, were being survived that in the past might have been fatal.
    Combined with raising the legal drinking age, these changes had cut the number of drunk driving deaths in half by the early 2000s. The drunk-driving fatality rate has been hovering in the range of one-third of all deaths ever since—which means about 12,000 deaths caused by drunk driving in 2014.
    There are devices that would add a few hundred dollars to the price of a new car that prevent them from being