Post on Drunk driving

Zaggeron · 09-15-2011, 05:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shadoquad

So just because distracted driving is bad, driving with a number of drinks in you is ok? I disagree.

As far as distracted driving, phones are just the tip of the iceberg and have been for years. People do a lot of stupid stuff while driving. How much of it can/should we legislate? I think license tests ought to be reissued every five years. You should be periodically retested for driving fitness, because that changes over time, in my opinion. But should police pull people over because they're applying makeup, eating a pastry, etc?

Or should people start taking responsibility for their driving habits? Abstaining from alcohol if you know you're driving, staying off the phone, pulling over to look at maps, etc, etc.

You are right in that other forms of impaired driving are tough to legislate. There's a large emotional component involved as these couple of threads have shown. Somehow people think a driver is more culpable for causing an accident while drunk than for causing an accident for some other impaired driving reason -- tired, cell phone, etc. In my opinion, in both sorts of cases the driver is equally cuplible.

There's a real sense in which the focus on "drunk driving" and "zero tolerance" actually makes things worse. Instead of using police resources to discover people who are a true danger to themselves and others, they play the game of numbers and politics -- getting 10 borderline cases off the road is better press than removing 5 seriously intoxicated folk.

I think we can all agree that if we can't catch all of them, it is better to catch the ones that pose the most risk, but checkpoints don't do that and zero tolerance doesn't do that.

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